by Pablo Medina
Today the lady across the way is quiet. Garrido has not come inquiring about his shoelaces in several days. Not even Orderly’s voice, which usually echoes through the hall all day long, is audible, and Amadeo is waiting for someone to puncture the silence of the early morning when he hears a familiar voice from the past. A chicken waddles by. He smells the backyard, hears a rooster crowing. The dog Campana is trying to catch flies with his mouth. He hears the voice again. Outside clouds have gathered, not the white billowing ones but thick leaden masses. Morning like dusk. The voice again followed by thunder, Julia entering through the door, hair and clothes wet, catching her breath, screaming that lightning has struck the Gales factory. Amadeo struggles to put his pants on, a shirt, no shoes, then runs outside, the thick heavy drops hitting his face and lightning striking all around him, the ozone smell, large puddles on the sandy roads, the factory on fire, firemen, pumps, hoses, flames spewing through the shattered windows, black smoke rising into the rain, people huddled in clusters, the workers trapped inside burned alive, then a woman being restrained. She wants to rush into the building, into the flames. Back home in the kitchen, he has a drink of rum to warm up and listens to Julia list the dead while she cooks a pot of soup that she will take to the widows: Arsenio and Wilfredo Gñmez, José Benítez, Catarino Lñpez, el Curro Vergara, el chino Chan, Elpidio Vázquez, Rafaelito Sáenz, on and on and goes beyond the twenty trapped in the factory and invokes people who didn’t die then but later of sickness or accident or old age. Amadeo hears the names of all the dead he has known but one and she is about to say it when he blinks and she’s gone.
The morning draws itself out and lengthens into a flat expanse of light where Amadeo feels shunted, bleached, diminished. Havana, he thinks, mornings in Havana were not like this. There was hot sun, there was the smell of fruit in the market, there were street hawkers singing their wares and women calling to them from the balconies and flowers dripping down the verandahs. There were stores open to the street and big black men carting bundles of cotton, sacks of sugar, baskets of fish. The arcades were filled with people who were alive, yelling and laughing, cursing one another then laughing again, for that is the way Cubans end things, with laughter. There were bookstores and shoe stores, pharmacies and lottery booths and newspapers of every type; there were ladies in their finery and Spanish soldiers and creole scribes and mulatto shoe shiners and Chinese cooks. Carts went by with fruit and vegetables, sides of beef, whole pigs slaughtered that very morning. There were huge hotels and small bars where you could sit and drink and not be bothered. There were street musicians and magicians and all manner of entertainment to be had for pennies. There were Hungarians, Filipinos, Englishmen, Irish boys and French matrons and American businessmen and Jewish peddlers. There were small alleyways to visit at night and broad tree-shaded promenades filled with Sunday strollers, children chasing each other, vendors selling peanuts, pork sandwiches, churros, coffee, sugar cane juice, fresh coconut that they would cut open on the sidewalk with a huge machete. On the Prado large black men dressed in white stood at the corners watching the traffic pass and small white men dressed in black played brisca, the Spanish card game, under the almond trees. Delight in disorder, the poet called it. That’s what Havana was. Amadeo wants to laugh, he is filled to bursting with that city, he wants to laugh away what has happened to him. Then all is gone in a wisp of smoke, Havana smoke.
He remembers how things between him and Julia thinned, then broke. She went to her rosary and her children; he went to Amalia’s dark belly, her big laugh like a mare in heat, her loamy smell. Albertico was dead and Amadeo could not stay in the house without thinking of him, his little nonsense games, his races from the living room to the kitchen. Julia abandoned him for a peculiar holiness, set herself up as a curandera to whom people came—at first only women, eventually men as well. Oh my wayward son, oh my adulterous husband, oh my dying mother. She held her sessions in the kitchen on a tall oak chair Jacobo Azar the carpenter designed especially so she could sit high over the supplicants. She dressed in flowing white or red or blue tunics depending on the day of the week and the saint she wanted to invoke. The neighbors passed by into the kitchen, one by one at first—Fefe from across the street, Carla Delgado, the pharmacist’s wife, Fico el cojo, doña Cándida Cadenas, the wealthiest woman in Ibor—then they came in groups from as far away as Ocala and Sarasota. People milled about on the porch, sat on Amadeo’s chair, and fell asleep on the sofa while waiting for their consultation with Julia, who sat on her chair like a high priestess barely blinking and declaring her pronouncements with a tubular voice and an accent that sounded like a Cuban version of an ancient European sage. Amadeo thought for sure his wife had lost her mind. At night after the crowds left, she had visions of the spirit world and held long conversations with the Virgin of Charity about the troublesome future of the human race. One night as Amadeo got ready for bed, Julia called him from the bathroom they had installed the week before and said, Amadeo, I have only six months to live. I am going to Havana to die. Amadeo went into the bathroom and saw her sitting on the toilet staring at the wall. You look fine to me, he said. The Virgin told me. She is ordering me to go back so that I can free my spirit over the waters. Go then, he said. He was sick of the pervasive sadness of the house and of Julia’s craziness. She went and did not die in the six months the Virgin had predicted but lasted two years. When he found out about her death, he wandered the city for a month feeling betrayed and hopeless, with the elephant of grief sitting on his shoulders.
Julia enters the room and sits on the visitor’s chair under the picture of the craggy mountains. She is Julia before the santería and the lunacy, before the long flowing robes of a high priestess, radiant with the long Semitic hair of her ancestors. She has a birth mark at the edge of her lower lip and that look of certainty in her eyes, as if she knows his thoughts before he says them. If Amadeo were a woman, he would like to be Julia. The craziness, Amadeo thinks, was only a means of understanding a world that kept taking things away from her. The lace and cotton dress she is wearing covers her chest and is pinned at the neck with a cameo brooch. It’s been such a long time, he says. Julia smiles and her face fills with light. I was away, she says. I don’t like this place, Julia de mi vida. You’ve never liked any place. The boys put me here. Leave, then. I can’t. Yes, you can. I will help you. She comes around the side of the bed and takes him by the arm. With her help he is able to sit up. He swings his legs to the floor, lurches forward and stands. Straightening up is a slow process which he does in increments, for all the years lying down have softened his spine; then he looks down to see the mound of his belly covered with a white hospital gown and below that an erection pointing straight out. Hah! He looks up to meet her eyes. He has forgotten their color and is pleased to see them a greenish blue. Turn, she says, and he does. Walk, she says, and he obeys, placing one awkward foot in front of the other, inching forward around the bed and out the door. They shuffle down the hallway ablaze in morning light, a fat old man helped along by a young woman dressed in a beautiful lace dress. He can smell her lilac smell, he can feel her long fingers holding up his arms. They take the elevator to the first floor, walk outside onto the grass in front of the driveway. His bare feet, gnarled and lumpy from disuse, seem like large unearthly worms marooned in chlorophyll. A sudden breeze catches his hair, and lifts it gently off his head as if her fingers were running through it. Time ago the future was this simple. Time ago there was a future.
Amadeo runs away from school. He hides in the mango grove where he eats fruit and talks with the lizards all day. When Amadeo’s father is not tending his fields or stocking the counters at the store, he is angry at the salesmen who try to sell him short, at his customers who haven’t paid their bills, at the weather when it rains too much or not enough, at his wife because the food she cooked gives him heartburn, at Amadeo for hiding in the grove. He will explode one day. Amadeo knows from an early age to avoid his father. Better the midday heat in
the grove, better the sweet smell of rotting mangoes. The lizards know well before the father appears that he is looking for Amadeo with a switch in his hand. They splay themselves out and expand their red throats so that Amadeo has enough time to climb up a tree from where he can watch the old man walk angrily around waving the chucho, calling out cabrñn, hijo de puta, come out. After some time he tires, his face red as the Canary sun he was born under, and goes back to the house to drink the thick Spanish wine that will kill him before he is fifty. Amadeo comes down just in time to talk with the snakes that lie curled at the base of the tree. The snakes are afraid of the moon and dogs and people but they do not mind Amadeo, who hates spiders and kills them so the snakes can eat them. The snakes tell Amadeo that he should leave his house as soon as he can, that the world is not full of rage and fear and bitter Spaniards. They warn him never to take fruit from a woman. Amadeo likes their dark green color but he dares not touch them. Then there is a rustling behind a coffee bush and he thinks his father has come back to fetch him and he starts to climb back up the tree, but it is his brother Tavito who has found him and starts honking like a goose. He talks as if he had no mouth and the words came out through his nose. Amadeo barely understands what his brother is saying, something about being in love, about getting married. There is a red welt running across his forearm, where his father has hit him. According to their mother, Tavito is retarded because he drank water from the fountain, which is her way of saying that as he was being born he opened his mouth and inhaled the fluid of the womb. Amadeo tells Tavito to be quiet and pulls him down by the arm to where he sits against the trunk. Tavito obeys his brother and whispers his honks, Toy enamorao como la hoja el caimito, he says repeatedly hitting his forehead with his knuckles. Toy enamorao como la hoja el caimito. By the time Tavito quiets down it is dusk. The sky is orange on one side and dark blue on the other. The snakes have slithered away and Amadeo decides it is safe to return to the house. His father is asleep from all the wine and by tomorrow he will supplant his anger with work. His father is Amadeo’s darkness.
It rains for many days and nights. It is a weighty rain, falling straight down, and if you go into it, it sears you. You feel every drop cutting into your skin, drumming on your skull, making it impossible to breathe. Morning is like night and night is a deep place from which no one ever returns. All the animals want to come inside the house and Amadeo’s mother spends her time shooing them back out. At first it is the black pigs that live in the yard; next, the chickens try to sneak into the kitchen when her back is turned. Even the bullfrogs that live around the watering trough have had enough rain. Amadeo’s father catches them in the bedroom and cuts off their legs, then throws their torsos into the mud of the yard while they are still alive. He cooks the legs in lard and feeds them to the boys. Tavito eats them with relish; Amadeo remembers the legless frogs struggling in the mud and refuses to eat. The father laughs. He leaves the house and disappears into the rain. His mother stops a moment and says, One less pest I have to worry about.
Julia has disappeared from Amadeo’s room and the print of the mountains draws his attention. He has not seen mountains like that anywhere, jagged masses of rocks smeared with snow. They rise out of a flat landscape where the trees are in the process of changing color. Fall up north, he thinks, the way he remembers the Catskills. In Florida leaves stay on trees all year round. The weather is warm through October then turns downward a bit. In December and January the northers come, cold and rainy, and in February the winds of Lent. By March it is hot again. Once he saw it snow in Tampa. Tropical snow. The dogs were howling all through the neighborhood and the pigs ate sand. Rubén came home with a welt on his face where a snowball hit him. While the snow lasted, Amadeo thought that all the dirt and grime of the world had been erased. He and Julia danced in the snow and they packed buckets and turned them upside down to make a snowman, but Pastor jumped off the porch onto the mound and flattened it. Overnight the whiteness melted and they went on with their lives as if nothing had ever interrupted it. Is that the way life is, he asks, a long flat line with occasional moments of excitement that interrupt and throw you off the line, and all you can do is crawl yourself back to it and hope it is still there, straight and predictable? Here in Santa Gertrudis he looks forward to the interruptions, today especially that Nurse has gone to the beach and Nurse II and Orderly are flirting with each other and don’t bother to check on him. By the time the sun sets Amadeo is hungry. It must be suppertime and they have forgotten to feed him. This is the kind of place his sons chose for him. The nurses don’t care if the patients eat or not, live or not. If he could get up, if he could only use his voice, he would tell them exactly how he feels. He’d demand to be taken away. They lounge around and make eyes at each other while the patients starve. Where are his sons? Where is his family? As Amadeo’s anger increases so does a feeling inside him that the world is moving away from him at blinding speed. His sons have forsaken him, his friends are dead. People go on with their lives: They renovate their living rooms, they cook, they go to the beach, they play their guitars, but he is reduced to a series of physical functions that he can no longer control. The story is almost over and as the world retreats, memory rushes in to replace it and along with it a self-pity he cannot control. It oozes out of him, it makes him drool, it blears his sight so that the snowy mountains become an underwater landscape.
How many hours does he wait for food? Time has a way of contracting and elongating so that minutes become hours and hours become whole afternoons. Time is relative, he remembers that from Einstein, but he doesn’t believe it. He believes what his stomach tells him: time to eat. He tries not to think of mango; he thinks of liver and prune, he thinks of mud from the bottom of the Almendares River. As the day darkens and the shadows begin to invade the room he becomes convinced that Nurse II and Orderly are sick of him and are trying to starve him to death. It is late, very late. He needs to be changed, he needs to be moved, but no one comes. The place is death. Amadeo is alone in all the whiteness, with dark seeping in. It must be they are tearing down Santa Gertrudis. They have moved all the patients to a new facility and left him behind. He waits for the wrecking ball to come crashing down on him. Amadeo is blinking furiously and saliva is sloshing out of his mouth. There is a noise like a huge machine grinding bones, there are jackhammers, truck engines rumbling, his chest about to burst, then the jingling of the food cart outside the door. Nurse II comes in with the tray, places it on the rolling table, and attaches the bib around his neck. She is short with long black hair that she ties back in a ponytail. Her face is deeply scarred from acne. When she reaches for one of the jars on the tray, Amadeo notices that her fingers are stubby and that she is missing half of her left thumb. Were he not so hungry this would spark his curiosity. Where have you been, Nurse II? You tormenting me? Not much of a talker, this one (locuaz, he thinks, no es muy locuaz que digamos). Amadeo can count on the fingers of one hand the things she has said to him. The first time she spoke to him she called him a helpless soul. The second time she wished him a Merry Christmas before inserting a suppository into him. The third time, not really speaking to him but to herself, she wished him a speedy death and called him viejo putrefacto, rotten old man. She prods his lips with the spoon and he opens his mouth, then shuts it quickly. He is immediately revolted by what he tastes and pushes it right out. Damn, he wants to say. Carajo! What are you feeding me? She scoops the paste that remains on his lower lip, refills the spoon and jabs his lips again. This time he keeps his mouth shut and she forces the spoon in. It tastes like a dead animal marinated in urine, like the lower intestines of a leper, like the scrapings of an abandoned outhouse. Amadeo tries to read the label on the jar but her stubby hand is covering it. Nurse II is saying nothing, not this time. She takes the little teddy bear filled with juice and pushes the tip into his mouth. He tastes apple, his favorite, and sucks until he has drunk about half. She picks up the jar with the black paste again. He tries to warn her by blinking b
ut she persists one last time, jamming the spoon into his mouth as deeply as it will go. He gags and spits it out. As she wipes his face with a corner of the towel he notices the watch on her wrist reads 11:02. He closes his eyes, distraught by the taste that has entered his mouth, spread up his olfactory canal, and blossomed in his brain. Bereft and hungry, suffocating with helplessness, he has nowhere to turn but to the picture of the mountains before him in which he envisions Nurse II walking, silent, stupid, indifferent until the only thing visible is the speck of her ponytail halfway up a snowy crag. Fall, he thinks, and she does.