Ruins

by Achy Obejas

  At his worktable, Virgilio examined the red panels with care, touching, staring, putting them under a magnifying lens. At one point, he put each in his sparkly palm, feeling its weight, then limped out to the patio—Usnavy at his heels, limping too from his blister—and looked at them in natural light. He stepped aside and probed the way light itself performed as it filtered through them. Red danced on the broken tiles, made the mustard-colored cat glance up from his regal nap and sniff the air.

  “Where did you get these?” Virgilio asked, clearly astounded.

  Usnavy shrugged. “Your cat,” he said, avoiding the question, “it looks like a lion.”

  Virgilio ignored him, lost in the texture and power of the two red panels. “These are … well, interesting,” he said.

  “Can you … can you tell where they come from?”

  “Where they come from? What do you mean, where they come from?”

  “I mean, you know, who made them, how old they are, that kind of thing,” Usnavy said, a bit flustered.

  Virgilio shook his head. “You can’t really date glass, it’s got no carbon in it. Sometimes you can tell something by the color—you know, certain colors didn’t exist before certain periods of times. We know that gaffers didn’t invent certain formulas until later. Other than that, well, unless you know the chemical formula you’re looking for, and unless you take a little piece of the glass you’re trying to date and grind it down so you can get somebody to do a chemical analysis, well, my friend, it’s pretty much impossible.”

  Usnavy pondered. “You have to do a straight-ahead comparison like that?”

  “Yeah, which, you understand, usually means you have to break the glass. That’s the only way to get a little piece to test it. And that pretty much ruins everything, so you can see what I mean by it being pretty impossible.”

  Usnavy nodded at the panels in Virgilio’s hands. “Are they Armstrong? Can you tell that?”

  Virgilio shook his head again. “They’re better than Armstrong.” He hobbled over to the apartment building and the silent domino game and came back, peeling bill after bill into Usnavy’s hand, all Washingtons, with their wavy white hair (like Usnavy), more bills than Usnavy had ever dreamed of.

  “Bring me the lamp,” said Virgilio, shimmering now.

  “The lamp?” a staggered Usnavy asked. His magnificent lamp? “I … I can’t.”

  “Then bring me the one you already brought me … you haven’t already sold it, have you? I’ll fix it for you.”

  “Oh that one!” said Usnavy, rolling the bills into a ball like Frank might have and stuffing them in his pocket. “Yes, yes—I still have that one, yes.”

  “You got this glass from another one, right?” Virgilio asked cautiously.

  Usnavy composed himself and ran his fingers through his white hair. “There are many others,” he said, mentally inventorying all the lamps he had seen across town, especially the one he thought he’d seen at the Badagry woman’s home, “many, many others.”

  In the weeks after the two red panels left Usnavy’s hands, Nena’s ID problem was finally solved, thanks to the temporary number and an accompanying U.S. bill discreetly placed in the palm of the clerk who, days before, could only shake his head. Jacinto’s mother got her medicine and was soon full of vim and vigor again, washing clothes out in the courtyard. Jacinto himself was able to buy varnish and putty and began working to restore the treasures hidden in his room. He put studs on the pillars, secured them with rope and wire. In the meantime, Lidia and Rosita’s sandwiches were now stuffed with single slices of canned Russian meat and sold at a profit on the streets of Old Havana.

  Usnavy had gotten the small lamp fixed too, not by Virgilio but by one of his assistants, the older guy who always hung around in the rear of the studio, his back a slope, his hands strangely stained and deformed, but agile. His name was Santiago and he never made eye contact with Usnavy, only shuffled along, agreeing with a grunt to all of Virgilio’s requests. Unlike Virgilio, Santiago did not sparkle, rather he seemed to sweep the light from the room. Usnavy would see him, a shadow, a manikin blowing bubbles, something unreal about him.

  Once fixed, the small lamp was sold to a woman named Fay Reeve from Martinsville, Indiana, who claimed to know a real Tiffany when she saw one. “My aunt—she was just a young girl from Ireland then—she was with him when he died,” she boasted of her connection to Louis Comfort Tiffany, never mentioning that by the time he passed, Tiffany was marginalized, a nineteenth-century anachronism, an embarrassment to American arts and crafts.

  The profits from the sale to the lady from Indiana provided enough for two bikes—a new (used) Trek for Usnavy and a Flying Pigeon for Nena—a small Samsung color television, new shoes for him (the kind with multilevel soles) and Lidia and Nena, and a new (used) refrigerator. Usnavy was bewildered, dazzled, by what he found he could do for himself and his loved ones all of a sudden.

  Now that there were dollars coming in, Lidia began to dream about driving again. “I can make more money that way than selling sandwiches,” she said, having done the calculations. (Besides, she was a driver by training and disposition, that was her life.) “If we could buy a car, I could taxi,” she continued, foraging in a box of Belgian chocolates for yet another piece, “and that’s not just easier to disguise but it also brings in more money.”

  In immediate response, Usnavy went about his new business every day, riding up and down Old Havana on his new (used) Trek bike, pedaling easily in his new multilevel shoes, looking for the telltale sign of a light in the ruins. He looked for glints, for iridescent rainbow reflections, for the kind of color evoked by glass and bronze. He’d peer in windows shamelessly, cataloguing goods, jotting down anything he thought might be of interest later. Soon, very soon, he would have enough dollars for a car for Lidia. Very soon she’d be cruising happily through the city.

  When not checking out the neighborhood—with its old colonial buildings, their walls leaning on the shoulders of those invisible giants Jacinto refused to believe in—Usnavy would spend hours sitting on the stoop, searching the skies for clouds and lightning. At the first raindrop, he would tear out of Tejadillo, his route all mapped out on his little notebook, zipping from one precarious building to another, looking for derrumbes. He could hear them before he saw them: a low groan buried deep in the pitter patter of the rain, a shriek when the wood surrendered, a sinister crack, and then boo-o-oom.

  If at one point he had worried that his neighbors would view him critically if he ever ceased in his duty to the Revolution—which Usnavy interpreted, first and foremost, as an implacable honesty—he now realized that by engaging in bisnes, as the Cubans called it, he’d actually gained a respect he’d never enjoyed before. The neighborhood thugs who once greeted him out of habit or obligation now slapped his shoulder in camaraderie. Bizarrely, this made it easier to get them to clean up the tenement, to chip in to the CDR. When he and Lidia went out for an evening walk, he could feel the eyes of the others, not exactly envious but desirous of her place, of being suddenly able to relax a little, to put worries aside. If he was not entirely comfortable with his new status, he was at least fascinated by it.

  These days, it seemed he was always prepared to dive into the mud and disaster of other people’s lives (his new [used] bike secured with chains and locks he carried around his shoulder like a presidential sash), rescuing treasures to sell to Virgilio and his mute assistants—or, in the worst cases, to Yoandry, who took on not only the lamps and electrical fixtures that Virgilio rejected but anything from broken chairs to bricks to children’s toys. However filthy he got in the process, he could wash it off. He could afford soap now, the good kind.

  Soon after the sale of the small lamp, Yoandry had come rapping at Usnavy’s door, sniffling and impudent, with his nicotine-stained fingers, eyeing Nena who, to Usnavy’s dismay, returned his gaze.

  “Get inside,” Usnavy said to her sternly.

  But an icy Nena ignored him. Instead she dir
ected her eyes beyond him, to the continuing activity in the courtyard where every day, one or two groups would disappear through the arch of the entrance, never to be seen again. They’d stroll away, cocky and cool, dragging plastic bags and homemade rafts, each farewell pulling on Nena’s own longing, he knew, like the tight, outstretched string of a crossbow.

  “I said, get inside,” Usnavy ordered again, then grabbed Nena’s arm and dragged the sullen girl into their room.

  Something had happened to her since the incident at the hotel, no matter that he’d gotten her the new bike and followed Lidia’s advice to buy her a few other things too: perfumes, creams, new clothes. The girl he’d known, sweet and open, had disappeared into the countenance of this sour young woman. She dropped on the bed without saying a word, her arms across her chest, staring at the dullness of the lamp above her, lightless.

  “What do you want?” Usnavy growled at the oily muscle boy outside.

  “He’s here, old man, that antiques dealer,” Yoandry said through a smirk. He looked past Usnavy to the door, as if searching for Nena.

  “What antiques dealer?” Usnavy asked as the door to his room popped open and a defiant Nena glared at him so hard and full of hate that he didn’t have the wherewithal to stop her as she rolled her own bike through the labyrinth of activity in the courtyard and out of sight.

  “You know what the man said,” declared a snickering, mocking Yoandry: “‘Silence is an argument carried on by other means.’”

  Usnavy sighed. How was it possible that this boy could be so disrespectful?

  Yoandry laughed. “Forget her for now, okay? I got more important stuff to talk to you about, old man.”

  “She’s my daughter—you forget her, okay?”

  “Whatever—listen to me: The antiques dealer, the one who’s gonna buy your lamp and make us rich? He’s here,” the muscle boy said.

  Usnavy grunted. “My lamp, huh?”

  “Yeah, that one.” Yoandry kicked open the unlocked door and pointed with his pimply chin at the magnificent one in the shadows, now hanging by both wire and rope in Usnavy’s feeble attempt to keep it afloat in spite of the crumbling ceiling. (He had taken the opportunity while up there to check yet again for anything that resembled the Tiffany signature, but his lamp was still without an identifying mark, a bastard child.)

  “Fire hazard, old man,” Yoandry added, seriously. “That thing’s gonna crash and shatter and then what are we gonna do, huh? You gotta do something about that. We should take it down, put it someplace.”

  Of course, the boy was right: But where? To bring it down from the ceiling in his room required moving the beds. Then where would they sleep? There was no way Usnavy would ever consider giving it to anybody else for safekeeping.

  Usnavy waved him away. But Yoandry caught his wrist. “Don’t do that,” the boy warned, reversing roles with him from the day at the beach.

  Usnavy yanked his wrist back. “Does Virgilio have a clue how you really are—how you are with everyone but him?”

  “Virgilio and I are family, it trumps everything,” Yoandry said, his cigarette dripping tobacco. “Now, family, you know about family, right, old man?”

  He didn’t believe for a moment this crude boy could be Virgilio’s kin, but why argue? “What do you want?” he asked, exasperated, as he took some wire he’d brought from a derrumbe and coiled it around his arm. He’d cut a little to secure the lamp but he knew Yoandry would take the rest. That meant at least a dollar or, maybe, two.

  “I want to talk about the lamp—that lamp,” Yoandry said, “not the bullshit little one you brought Virgilio and me.”

  “Virgilio and you?” asked an incredulous Usnavy. “You said it was trash, remember?”

  “Well, yeah,” said Yoandry, the grin on his face just ugly now.

  “Funny, you’d bring foreigners here but I bet you haven’t told Virgilio about this other lamp, have you?”

  “Not yet.”

  Usnavy scoffed. “Hell, Yoandry, you’re not going to. You want to sell directly to the foreigner.”

  Yoandry laughed. “Hey, you’re catching on—we skip the middleman. It’s a bigger profit. Just you and me, we’ll get a much better deal from the antiques dealer.”

  “But we’d get a better deal if Virgilio fixed the lamp. It has a few problems, you know.”

  Yoandry shook his slimy head. “Uh uh,” he said. “We can sell this one right like this. Why go through all that trouble, huh?”

  Usnavy knew why: The boy thought it was a Tiffany. He thought, even with the missing panels, that he could make such a good deal that he didn’t need to risk getting Virgilio involved, having to share, or maybe getting left out altogether. Usnavy shook his head in disgust: The same lamp, the same artistry, he was sure, would be worth nothing to him if he knew it was probably made by some poor Cuban fool in Oriente and dragged to the city by an unsuspecting young woman and her misbegotten son. And that Cuban fool, he thought, was even worse off than Lam, Picabia, and Meucci. Nobody even knew his name to argue for him.

  “Hey, I can bring that antiques dealer over right now if you want,” Yoandry suggested, his palms touching and pointing in Usnavy’s direction as if he were in church, even though there was nothing reverential about his gesture.

  When the boy mentioned the antiques dealer, Usnavy imagined someone tall and rugged, like he supposed Mr. Tiffany had been, or perhaps like Burt (a quasi-American), only grander—in fact, like the Americans of his mind’s eye, the ones he’d known in Caimanera and Guantánamo, sturdy and rowdy and even kind of amiable, if a little unintentionally condescending. (Mr. Tiffany surely would have fit right in among the officers at the base, Burt among the enlisted men.)

  “C’mon, Usnavy, let’s take down the damn lamp,” Yoandry entreated. “I can spruce it up at the shop, I can store it. I can even put in some new glass on those empty slots. See, we don’t need Virgilio for this. It’ll make us rich.”

  “If it’s my lamp, it’s not going to make you rich now, is it? Not for sale,” Usnavy said as he locked the door to his room behind him, guarding his treasure. A panel here and there he could do, he’d decided, because those could be replaced eventually—but to pack up and give away the whole thing? No way. If somebody ever got ahold of the lamp and had a chance to examine it, there would be no fooling anyone anymore. Then what would he have?

  “Everything’s for sale,” countered Yoandry.

  Usnavy stiffened. “Let’s see if we understand each other, okay? The damn lamp is not for sale. It’s my lamp, get it?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  Usnavy rolled right past him. “You’re just a punk speculating about things you know nothing about. Not for sale—understand?”

  “You’re the one who doesn’t understand,” Yoandry said. “But you will.”

  Usnavy had been reading again, not just at the library, but at Virgilio’s, where the silent gaffers recycled glass in huge barrels (most of it Cokebottle green when it came out again) and the sparkly man spent hours hunched over a table, soldering little pieces of copper foil into panels for glorious lamps that would disappear in a day or two while countless others hung in the shop gathering dust.

  Now that he’d become a regular, now that he’d gotten used to entering beyond the wall of heat at the studio door and knowing that he’d melt only a little with each visit, Usnavy had also begun to notice other things: that Virgilio only worked on lamps that were sold upon completion, that Santiago and the younger man, Manolín, often studied catalogues and old, yellowed magazines for hours to figure out designs.

  Between turning pages in the old magazines and scratching the necks of Virgilio’s plump cats, Usnavy would worry about the lamps that were there eternally, never meant for sale yet not quite decoration. They existed, Usnavy decided, as a distraction, so that if a visitor came only once or twice, he or she would think they would be sold like any other piece of merchandise. But they were too plain, too simple, too cheap. They were part of some la
rger scheme, this he knew.

  Mr. Tiffany, he now determined, had been a man who aspired to art and a purity of spirit completely at odds with what made him famous. But those lamps of his—his signature pieces—were assembled in factories, churned out by the hundreds and thousands with little regard for art. Usnavy thought of Louis Comfort Tiffany not as a robust practitioner of capitalism but as its victim, a man simply too caught up in it to understand how it was killing him. His lamps existed solely to exploit electricity, the twentieth century’s juice, to blunt its queer light, to make it mellow and safe.

  The man died alone (regardless of what that woman from Indiana had said), Usnavy noted, his moment in the spotlight long gone, all those people who’d bought those lamps once thought of as treasures having moved on to the next thing, the lamps stowed away in basements and attics all over the eastern seaboard and Midwest of the United States. In a weird way, Usnavy felt for him, pitied him.

  No longer keeping regular hours at the bodega, Usnavy had, in the meantime, become the focus of the CDR, which sent friends to search him out.

  “Look, just come in the morning,” Minerva said during a visit to the stoop at Tejadillo, where she found a fastidious Usnavy squinting at a hazy but sunny day.

  He was listening to reports on his new (used) Walkman about the upcoming invasion of Haiti by U.S. troops and he was bewildered by the fact that they were actually going to reinstall a Marxist-leaning expriest as president, not topple him. It must be a trap, he thought, what else could it be?

  A black cat peeked at him from a nearby rooftop, inscrutable.

  “It could rain, don’t you think?” Usnavy asked Minerva absentmindedly, pointing at the sky. He listened for the murmur of a building in distress. He’d tried to check out Badagry’s again—he’d convinced one of her sisters to let him take a look at her leaky ceiling, telling her he might be able to help put up posts like Jacinto. But he didn’t get very close to the lamp because Badagry was home and stopped him cold at the door, saying they were moving soon, that the housing authorities had promised them a new place.