Ruins

by Achy Obejas

  During the years of the colony, the owners had lived upstairs in their dry serenity, sometimes with an occasional boarder or guest, but downstairs, in the shadowy and damp chambers, retail merchants—nearly all of them recent Spanish immigrants—would sell their cheap wares on portable tables, blankets, and display cases that could be pushed like carts. Standing there with the injured lamp in a brown paper bag in his hands, Usnavy felt a little like they might have, like somebody who had washed up on the shores.

  “Excuse me,” he said as he ventured toward a thin young man in a tie-dyed T-shirt and sporting a ponytail. The fellow was having a smoke and puttering outside the Fondo but exuded authority in a way that suggested he worked there. “I’m looking for someone … I don’t know his name, he works on lamps.”

  “Lamps? Lots of guys work on lamps,” the young man said with a lazy smile. “Do you know what kind of lamps?”

  “Like this,” Usnavy said, opening the mouth of the paper bag enough to let the injured lamp sparkle.

  “Ahh …” the young man said, throwing his cigarette to the ground and grinding it out with his foot. Usnavy took note of his shoe: Its sole was multileveled, like Burt’s. “This fellow always wears overalls? ‘The reality of things is their light’—that guy?”

  Usnavy had never heard the sparkly man say such a thing but it sounded right to him so he nodded.

  “That’s Virgilio,” said the young man. “He’s at his shop. Are you a private client?”

  Usnavy hesitated. “I … I don’t know, I just want to fix the lamp,” he said.

  The young man leaned over and peered into the bag again. “That could cost you. You just want light, right?”

  Usnavy nodded again.

  “Well, that’s going to be expensive. If I were you, I’d get a new lamp, something practical, something more modern. That one’s kind of ostentatious, don’t you think?”

  “You’re probably right, yes,” Usnavy said, trying to gauge his response. Was this guy trying to deceive him, like Yoandry that first day? “But I inherited this lamp from my mother, so it’s got sentimental value,” Usnavy lied, reducing his mother’s gift to something so small, so unlikely. “You know how that is,” he continued, his hand stroking the paper bag and clutching it tighter. “We become attached to things even if they’re worthless.”

  The young man shrugged. He tilted his head and stared at his undoubtedly expensive American shoes. Usnavy could see him skipping across the sea in those things.

  Virgilio—the sparkly man—lived a good way from the Fondo, up by the gleaming glass building that was the old American embassy, now officially called the U.S. Interests Section. It was one of the tallest, most modern buildings in the city. From the first haze of light in the skies each day, there was always a long, sullen line of visa petitioners stretching around it for blocks. The column was orderly and quiet but secreted an air of fatality as it inched forward. Even the small children hanging off their parents were unusually gloomy, everyone committed to giving up their memories of seashells and hurricanes and Revolution.

  Usnavy walked gingerly on the shady side of the street across from them, prospective exiles who, at another time, would have been viewed as enemies or traitors. He couldn’t begin to count how often he’d been called—and how often he’d responded—to repudiate and denounce a neighbor who’d decided to leave. At first, their flight was what he clearly perceived as betrayal, and his arm would be hearty and hurl eggs and tomatoes with the kind of fuel only rage can provide.

  But later his body faltered, perhaps from old age, but more likely from the pain these constant losses caused him: Each time he pitched a rotting grapefruit or other piece of garbage at someone who had once been his friend—a boy he’d seen grow up in the tenement, a good boy, one of the sapos from the domino games; or a young woman who’d extended a kindness, perhaps with medicine for Nena, or a cold drink in her living room while he watched the Comandante on her TV; or someone who’d given Lidia a bit of oil or a candle—he felt weaker and weaker, until one day he went to one of those horrible encounters and could hardly move. As everyone around him yelled obscenities at the frightened elderly couple who’d scored visas to the U.S. (and whom Usnavy knew from the CDR itself, both former officers, competent and enthusiastic), he shuffled through the throngs, embraced them both wordlessly, and went home. After that, he never again allowed himself to be volunteered for that particular kind of activity.

  Now, Usnavy saw Virgilio frown as he poked his head into the artisan’s studio. Though the interaction at Lámparas Cubanas had been pleasant enough, it was clear that the more recent episode in which Usnavy had almost run him over in the Daewoo was still fresh on Virgilio’s mind (tinted windows and all!).

  “You nearly killed me,” he said just as Usnavy tiptoed in. The door was held open by a block of blue glass that looked like a chunk of ice. Usnavy wanted to touch it but kept his hands on the paper bag with the injured lamp, gripping it a little tighter.

  Virgilio’s studio was an old stable turned into a garage in the back patio of a huge house that, like the tenement at Tejadillo, had been divided and subdivided until it was left with many single rooms. But to Usnavy’s surprise, the only people he saw crossing the patio on his way to the back were old men and women, older than he in fact. A couple of the men wore yarmulkes, though they had no meaning for Usnavy. (The Jews he knew in Old Havana—usually called Turks and Poles by the Cubans—looked like everybody else.) There were no kids anywhere, not even around the domino game in the parlor that Usnavy stopped to watch for a moment before heading toward the rear. To his amazement, the elderly players maintained a complete and total silence; the only sound was the rattle of the dominos on the table, their little metal navels scratching its surface until it resembled nothing less than a tangle of wire and bars. In the meantime, a couple of cats looked on, snuggling together in the shade, bizarrely fat, oblivious to all dangers.

  Facing Virgilio in the studio, Usnavy held the lamp like a baby. All around the artisan—again wearing his sparkly blue overalls—there were lamps, red and blue and orange panels, cooling on work frames, lamps drawn with flowers or trees, resting on shelves and in rows on the floor, lamps with seascapes and deep purples hanging by the dozen from the ceiling, though not one of them was turned on. Instead, just like at Lámparas Cubanas, they were bathed in the frosty filter of a long white fluorescent tube, plus whatever natural light leaked in through the windows. In the rear of the garage—in its day it would have housed about a dozen cars, one for nearly every apartment—there were piles of sand, metal benches, and a large contraption that looked like a cross between a furnace and a submarine.

  Another old man puttered about, his face in the shadows. A younger man followed him. The two were stretching a large piece of something that resembled jelly, uncurling it from a folded position onto a large metal table. In the corner was what looked like a barrel with a smoldering white fire. The two men did everything in silence, working like insects and balseros, but confident of their timing. Holding the piece with pincers, they carefully placed it in a giant metal box that looked like a refrigerator, then relaxed, slapping each other around in congratulation. The heat was unbearable but the two just wiped the sweat from their bodies with their bare hands, sputtering in the flames of the barrel.

  “You were driving like a fool, like a maniac,” said Virgilio, who was sitting at a table, pushing a piece of red glass under a stylus with a tiny diamond point and drawing a long, willowy flower into the surface. A thin hose attached to the stylus sprayed the point, the glass, and most of Virgilio’s chest, which was protected by a black rubber apron. The water ran onto a pan and down to the floor, creating a giant black shadow on the cement; it was everywhere.

  Virgilio’s face was oval, a whirly knot on a tree trunk. His pupils were enlarged to macabre proportions by the glasses barely hanging on to the tip of his flat upside-down T-shaped nose. But he wasn’t wearing anything other than his regular frames to protec
t his eyes. Even though he was annoyed and wet, his face and body continued to sparkle as if sprinkled with fairy dust.

  Usnavy swallowed hard, hugging the injured lamp even closer to him.

  “I see you finally got your—what was it?—Armstrong 2401?” he said, nodding in the direction of the reddish glass. “American glass, right?”

  Virgilio raised an eyebrow. “So you’re a bad driver but a good listener,” the man replied, not even glancing up. “What can I do for you?” One of the domino-watching cats—the white one—came and pressed himself against Virgilio’s leg, oblivious to the water, as if he didn’t understand his own species’ natural aversion.

  Usnavy couldn’t help but look up and around. So many lamps! But not one of them was magnificent and so Usnavy had secondary, conflicting emotions: On the one hand, that they hung there in varying states of completion meant that orders kept coming in before Virgilio could finish with one or another; but, on the other, if there were so many already available, the wounded one he was nursing wasn’t that special after all.

  “It must be peculiar to live so close, huh?” he said, pointing with his shoulder in the direction of the American quasi-embassy. His face was also wet now from the heat, slippery.

  Virgilio shrugged. The other cat, a mustard-colored brute that looked like a lioness, trailed in, sniffed at Usnavy, and turned away unimpressed.

  “I mean, I don’t know … all that sadness,” Usnavy said. His shirt sucked onto his back, soaked.

  Virgilio frowned again. “It’s always been like that,” he said. “Always.”

  “Yeah?” Usnavy felt perspiration collecting in his solar plexus, a river down to his waist, tickling his navel. Cubans had always wanted to leave? Always? That couldn’t be true.

  “Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, but there hasn’t been a day since 1951—that’s when I first moved here—without a line out there,” Virgilio said. “The rest is lies, politics, and fable.”

  Usnavy nodded out of courtesy. “‘The reality of things is their light,’” he said sheepishly while wiping his face with his hand, which dripped as it crossed his line of vision.

  Virgilio finally looked up. He squinted at Usnavy, as if whatever he was giving off was too blinding to face straight ahead. “You don’t read Thomas Aquinas,” he said, not a question or accusation, but a simple statement of fact. His two assistants were now poking the barrel with a long metal pipe, the young man watching as the older one twirled the pipe between expert fingers.

  “I read Fanon, I read Soyinka,” Usnavy responded, flustered. His buttocks were drenched, his underwear clinging to him like a second skin. “And Hemingway, of course.”

  “But not Guillén and Langston Hughes?” Virgilio finished his engraving and lifted his foot from a pedal Usnavy hadn’t noticed before. The diamond tip went limp, the water a trickle.

  Usnavy sighed. “Of course Guillén and Langston Hughes. I meant beyond that.”

  “But you’re not interested in light, not really,” said Virgilio. “You’re interested in glass.” Then, without hesitating: “Is that the same lamp I saw the other day?” The snow-colored cat curled into a ball, its whiteness challenging the block of blue at the door.

  Usnavy nodded as he handed Virgilio the bag. “Is that really true,” he asked as the artisan pulled the injured lamp out to the light, “that there’s been a line out there since 1951?” He gazed meaningfully in the direction of the Americans.

  “Uh huh,” Virgilio answered while examining Usnavy’s lamp again. “Maybe even before that. But certainly longer than 1959. Now, tell me something.”

  “Yes.” The heat was making him dizzy, the tracers orange and pink.

  “Since I already saw this lamp and gave you a recommendation—a recommendation you can’t afford—why would you bring it back?”

  “I felt,” said Usnavy as he took a long and labored breath, watching while the old man in the back blew into one end of the pipe and the other end grew into the color and size of an avocado, “that there was something you weren’t telling me, that maybe you couldn’t tell me … there.”

  Virgilio leaned back and arched his eyebrows. He scratched the mustard-colored cat’s neck, leading him to purr so loudly Usnavy was initially startled. But after a pause, Virgilio vigorously shook his head, causing a light shower of sweat that the cat, inexplicably, didn’t seem to mind.

  “No,” he finally responded. “I said all I had to say then. Maybe it’s you who has something to tell me.”

  After his unproductive visit to Virgilio’s infernal studio—the man wouldn’t fix the lamp without payment of at least the twenty-dollar bill in Usnavy’s pocket, nor would he consider buying the lamp—Usnavy walked over to the hospital to see about the number on Nena’s birth certificate. Earlier, while washing and dressing, he had confided to Jacinto what had happened at the Habana Libre and he was surprised by his friend’s rather mild and sensible response.

  “She’s a kid, Usnavy,” he’d said while fixing Usnavy’s shoe again. Jacinto’s mother lay quietly in her bed, flushed and satisfied. “You’re lucky that’s all that happened. Thank the saints, my friend—she’s not pregnant, she didn’t get caught stealing or leaving the country. All kids rebel, that’s what they do, old man. C’mon, how long has it been since you were a little wild? All kids are a little wild.”

  Usnavy struggled to remember when he’d been a little wild … maybe back when, as a boy, he’d steal picture books and comics from the foreign men who came to sit in his mother’s parlor and then, after he’d finished looking at them—he really couldn’t read them, they were in English anyway—he’d return them, sometimes a little worn, sometimes a little smudged, but always whole.

  Usnavy was crossing the street to the hospital, barely looking at traffic as he tussled with his memory, when he almost ran into the boy from the previous morning, the one who’d explained to him about Jacinto’s ex-wife and the brujería.

  “Hey—hey—watch it, old man,” the kid said. He was wearing what looked like a dozen black hula-hoops around his neck.

  “Sorry,” Usnavy answered, scarcely looking up, until he realized what it was the boy was carrying. “Eh … whoa, wait a minute.” Usnavy ran across the street after him, his knees popping and cracking with each step. The blister on his foot had swollen and broken open again from so much walking. He limped and cringed and cursed under his breath. The broken lamp, still in the sack, rattled a little. “Those are bike tires?”

  The kid kept walking, eyeing the jingling bag and the old man suspiciously and nodding with disdain. “Yeah. So?”

  “So I need a bike,” Usnavy said.

  “So?” the boy retorted even more insolently.

  “So you’ve got bike tires, I need a bike … What I’m asking isn’t so difficult to decipher,” Usnavy shot back, impatient now.

  “Aw, you’re too late. I sold mine already. So you see, I can’t help you, old man, I’m out of here.”

  Usnavy was panting as he tried to keep up with him. “What do you mean you’re out of here?”

  “I mean, I’m gone, old man, gone!” he said with a grin that filled up his whole face. “I’m on my way to La Yuma!”

  “Wait a minute—wait a minute!” Usnavy snapped, grabbing his arm. The bike tires tumbled from the kid’s skinny frame, trapping him at an angle, encircling him mid-torso but for Usnavy’s strong fingers. “What the hell do you mean?”

  “C’mon, old man, you know what I’m talking about—everybody knows you helped your friend Obdulio,” the boy said, shaking him off and grabbing the tires like the hem of a colonial-era skirt. “Listen, the coasts are wide open, they’re letting everybody go … People are even leaving right from the Malecón. How long can that last, huh? I’ve got to take my opportunity.”

  Usnavy was stupefied. “Everybody knows …? They’re leaving from the Malecón … Wait—what about your parents? Your family? You’re just a boy!”

  He was even younger than Nena! What was going
on?

  The kid shrugged and laughed and ran along. “I’m going with Chachi and Yamilet—I’ll send you a postcard, old man!” he yelled over his shoulder as the bike tires danced about him.

  At the hospital Usnavy could barely concentrate. He was told to go upstairs to the records office but he kept wandering into lightless rooms where long lines of patients waited with wide-eyed, resigned faces. They didn’t look much different than those curling around the U.S. Special Interests Section, their lives in the balance.

  There was a handwritten sign on the elevators: Reserved for Patients Only. Usnavy counted steps as he went up in order to keep himself focused. One, two, three, four. He’d heard that this was a good way to concentrate; you could see a lot of seniors in Havana now, veterans of those early-morning open-air Tai Chi classes, going about their days counting everything from the cracks in the sidewalks to the liver spots on their hands. Usnavy held the injured lamp under his arm and strained as he took the steps—fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—imagining himself at the local park, doing stretching exercises with widows and lost men.

  On the second floor, he found himself in a shadowy hallway turned into some sort of office where a few solemn-faced nurses scribbled by hand. Their work was tucked into file folders piled high on a table. One of the nurses appeared to be on break, smoking, with a severe look on her face as she played solitaire. Another nurse was talking on the phone, giggling and gossiping.