by Julia Cooke
“You can’t put a price on health, and any price you could put on it would be low compared to what you get,” he said. He had seen a documentary recently about a guy in Africa who had died, he continued. They’d done a ritual on him, fed him something the ancestors had said he could eat in order to cheat death, and he woke back up. To this day, said Isnael, “he’s still alive in that little pueblito in Africa.”
“And you believe this?” I said.
“Yes of course, why wouldn’t I? I saw it with my own eyes.”
I looked down at the many pairs of legs around ours. This was not what I’d have cited to prove the legitimacy of Santería’s sway over the country. There were too many holes to poke through the veracity of an Internet video. But instead I asked about the flowers.
Throughout the bus ride, he’d cupped his body around a bouquet of flowers he’d bought for the ceremony, and as we walked to Marielena’s he carried them with the buds facing down, because “cities are filled with energy, some bad and some good, and these flowers should stay clean of it, not up and open to receive it.”
At Marielena’s, details like this floated ethereal around the living room as I sat on one side of a lopsided circle of chairs, watching Isnael pull the buds off the flowers and toss them into a bowl. As the group gathered, they gossiped about who had recently had babies and who was selling what on the black market. I had imagined that a Santería ceremony to channel the spirits of the dead through a medium might include dripping candles in dank rooms, hand-holding, maybe some animal sacrifice. This was more like family therapy in a church basement. The small talk came to a close as the last of ten people walked in. Marielena clapped her hands, saying, “OK, everyone, let’s get started.” Isnael took a chair four people away from me.
I held a wrinkled copy of the words as we began to chant translations of the Hail Mary and the Nicene creed, rhythms familiar from childhood masses with my grandmothers, but these new words repeated in circles, an unbroken spiral as one incantation fed the next, then, without pause, back to the beginning of the first. The edges of the paper were stained dark with finger oil. Isnael recited by heart. Marielena’s son, a tall man wearing a crisp green army uniform—he had just been called to participate in a military exercise and would leave for the countryside after the ceremony—drummed a beat on the flipped-over back of a seat cushion. The chanting continued but everyone now switched to call-and-response in Spanish and Yoruba. A pudgy ahijado with two earrings—Ariel, son of Mirna, the similarly rotund, fidgety white woman who had convoked this ceremony—clapped an intermittent opposing beat. The whining wail of the leading voice shifted around the room as different people sang the verse.
Marielena sat toward a corner. She wore a skirt made of triangles of brightly colored fabric and her long fingernails wore chipped pink nail polish. She raised her hand to stop the singing. Her chest was rigid. She sucked on the end of a cigar and nodded her head faintly, imperiously. The room shivered with a bruisy quiet. A moth flickered around the lightbulb, pinging as its wings hit the glass. Marielena squinted her eyes. She started pelting Mirna with questions shaped like statements.
“I see . . . I hear noises in your house.”
“Luz,” Mirna responded, nodding.
“There’s an angry spirit. He’s rustling around your house, making noises, like, for example, when you think no one is home, mmmhmmm. . . . Is that right?”
“Luz.”
“That big bang you heard a few weeks ago? You thought it was maybe a car backfiring, or fireworks, but no, no . . . no, it was the spirit.”
“Luz,” Mirna leaned forward.
Marielena nodded thoughtfully. She detailed the offerings that Mirna could make to placate this angry spirit—food and alcohol by the front door. Once he got his fill, the spirit would leave her family alone. Mirna listened, credence written on her broad face. Isnael looked at Marielena reverently.
The question-and-answer ping-ponged to different people in the circle. Marielena had explained to me earlier, as her devotees had filtered in, that insight came from the spirit she channeled, Francisca, who showed her visions but needed confirmation or denial from the people in the room to guide the visions toward the truth. She consulted nearly everyone for around five minutes each. Then Marielena turned to me.
“What you’re doing right now, you didn’t study to do it, did you,” she murmured as if to herself. “You studied something similar, though.”
“Yeah, that’s right, kind of,” I said, startled. As the words left my mouth, Mirna, seated next to me, nudged me to uncross my legs—crossed arms or legs kept the spirit from touching down in the human world—and whispered that the only answer was luz, light, to indicate that Francisca was on the right path. “Luz” or “no.”
“Mmm,” murmured Marielena with a sharp nod. “The shadow of my spirit says that if you truly devote yourself to what you are doing, you will find much success.”
A doll in a skirt that matched the one that Marielena wore stared down from her perch atop the refrigerator.
I paused before saying, “Luz.”
Her shiny plastic ankles stuck out and her eerily large eyes gazed over my head.
“Cuba is an important place for you,” Marielena continued. “But something holds you back from truly committing to being here.”
“Luz,” I said, nodding. Isnael, two people away from me, tracked my reactions. I was suddenly conscious of trying to keep my cheeks and eyebrows as flat as possible.
“If you stay, Cuba will be good for you,” she said. “You should be here, really be here.”
Then Marielena began to tell me about a place, a street where row houses lined up and shared walls and had stairs leading up to their front doors. It was vague enough that, on the slide show in my mind, I saw various places that I’d either lived in (college, Mexico City) or visited before (Europe, Vietnam). Really, it could have been anywhere. “Luz,” I said hesitantly—I told her it sounded kind of like where I lived in Mexico City. In a room full of Cubans who had never left the island, I was embarrassed to highlight the differences between us. Once I had consciously given her a half-truth, her knowing nod looked fake.
“Yes, of course, it is your home. There is a young man, and he is entering your house,” she said. “He is at home in your house. Now he is answering your door.”
I didn’t know many very young men, and certainly none that would be entering and exiting my house as she’d described. I told her as much.
“It is someone younger than you, like Isnael’s age. Who could it be?” Her eyes flicked over to Isnael, and back to me.
I contradicted her vision gingerly, not wanting to upset the balance of power, and asked her who it might be if it wasn’t someone I already knew. Perhaps she was referring to Isnael, imposing something lurid on what I had appreciated as a rare platonic dynamic with a Cuban male, an interview subject whose statements weren’t spiked with innuendo, and my resentment swelled and grew. Her pause stretched on. The room was quiet and I tried to keep my face impassive.
“She believes,” someone on my right murmured. Everyone looked at me, scouring my face for signs of disbelief.
“She believes,” Marielena’s son said, louder then, as if to dismiss the idea that my belief was just on loan until Francisca proved her omniscience. It’s okay if some predictions are slightly off, he seemed to tell me with his eyes. Isnael looked down. And just like that, Marielena’s motives were on my mind. I had lied by omission in the name of trying to belong, and she had played along. She seemed smug and everyone stared at me. I felt a saccharine look coming over my face as I tried to hide my skepticism from Isnael. The absence of my disagreement or affirmation crackled and the hush stretched and grew and I strained not to fidget.
“You’ll see, he’ll come to you . . . you’ll find out who he is soon enough,” Marielena said with a shrug to dismiss the point. She moved on to consult with the last two people in the room.
After about an hour’s consultation with Francisca
, Marielena was quiet. The chanting resumed, this time raucous and less serious than before. It was something between a support group meeting and a festive tribal drum circle; it was not remotely like a séance. I recited phonetically similar phrases in the chorus of the songs and Marielena’s son caught me and cracked a joke, pointing and exclaiming something that I didn’t catch. Everyone laughed. I smiled and shrugged while clapping. My back and legs felt cramped; I had spent two hours glued to the seat of my uncomfortable metal chair. Every time I tried to find a better position and lifted my knee to cross my legs, Mirna poked my thigh and shook her head. Then she’d lift the edges of her mouth in a taut, conspiratorial smile and offer me a cigarette. It was the only coping mechanism available in the smoky room.
Suddenly, Isnael rose from his seat, shoulders heaving to the beat of the makeshift drum. The jokes stopped. He tossed himself onto the floor and crouched on all fours. His head hung limply down, its crown nearly touching the concrete floor. His body was taken over by tremors. He mumbled unintelligibly as he began to rise to his feet. His knobby knees rattled; he put his hands on them to stabilize himself and stood. He danced a jittery sequence in the middle of the circle. His eyes were squeezed shut and his mouth puckered. He fell to the ground, pounded the floor with his fist, and pushed himself up again. The cycle repeated.
Isnael was no longer the confident kid who just a few hours earlier had marched down the streets of stately Vedado, fake Gucci sunglasses tucked into his hair. A water main near the bus stop had broken, and the sidewalk had puddled with rippling water that made its way down the incline toward the ocean. He’d leapt over it and turned back to offer me his hand. I saw no trace of that self-assured boy. Isnael now was panting, fervent, nearly drooling, an embodiment of something entirely different from the person I knew. It was as if he’d sliced himself in two and here in front of me was the uncouth, the urgent part of him, allowed contact with the world in this room only.
I stopped trying to keep up with the ceremony, stopped chanting and clapping. No one looked at his face but me; no one seemed surprised but me. Isnael’s tall, tired-looking, Lycra-clad mother, who had arrived late at Marielena’s and hovered in the doorway, clapped along, somber but blank. His trance lasted for ten minutes that felt much longer: The group sang an intense call-and-response, copying Marielena’s son in a jagged chorus.
The fridge moaned gently under the beat. Isnael crouched down and pounded the floor again, this time calling for aguardiente in a coarse voice. He gurgled it down. Then he asked for blessed water, which Marielena poured on his face, and this woke him up. His head hung toward his sloped shoulders as he returned to his seat, squeezed between Ariel, Mirna’s son, and his teenage girlfriend. The singing continued, but tersely, the edges of each verse sharper than before.
After another ten minutes, Mirna started to cry, the unfiltered cigarettes that she had been chain-smoking quivering at her lips. She wiped her face with the back of a clumsy hand.
Three hours into the ceremony now, Francisca came to inhabit Marielena’s body. She had been an outside force before, but now Marielena entered a trance. Her posture changed: back straight, head high, eyes lightly but firmly shut, mouth pursed. She sat with her legs wide apart on her seat, one hand on each knee, her multicolored skirt draped over her ample legs. Francisca’s face was regal, with an aloofness foreign to Marielena. I had to admit that Marielena’s gold teeth and pink fingernails looked different on Francisca. She asked for a cigar and began to chew on it.
Francisca began to speak in a language with repetitive sounds and words that I didn’t understand. She drank sweet wine as she ate her cigar down to a nub. After each sip of wine, she smacked her lips a few times. One by one, each person stood in the middle of the circle to consult with Francisca. Each time someone’s reality seemed not to match with the spirit version she was seeing, her forehead lined with consternation.
Francisca advised everyone in the room in this Yoruba-Spanish language. I was left to read her actions. Ariel, Mirna’s son, appeared to be having sexual trouble; Francisca pulled open the waistband of his pants and blew cigar smoke down them. I gathered that Mirna was reassured that the ghost haunting her house would leave. Isnael, the apprentice, sat against the wall. When it was my turn, Marielena’s son translated into Spanish as Francisca told me that I needed a new pen. It had to be a fountain pen and it didn’t matter if it worked or not. I was to blow cigar smoke on it and rub it with perfumed water and, if possible, bring it to Marielena to be blessed. The talisman would steer my writing toward success.
When Marielena woke out of her trance, it was nearly one o’clock in the morning. We had been in the room for four hours. After a few more chants, the mass was unceremoniously over. We were all mosquito-eaten from bugs that no one had noticed, our eyes bleary from cigarette smoke. Someone noted that it was now Valentine’s Day, so everyone hugged and kissed, an incongruous festive air slicing through the fatigue.
Marielena was visibly tired. She cut a loaf of bread, spread mayonnaise on each piece and, moving slower than she had earlier, passed around the plate as the group dispersed. Isnael whispered that I should offer my 10 CUC derecho fee to the doll on Marielena’s fridge. I found myself looking more intently at Isnael than I had five hours earlier, as if I’d find something I hadn’t seen before. Marielena’s son asked how I would get home, since I was the only person who did not live within a few blocks. If I wanted, he said, he’d make room in his bed. Suddenly, reason came whooshing back into my mind. It was late at night and I wasn’t sure where I was or how to get home. The fifteen-minute cab ride between me and familiar downtown Havana seemed very far. I wanted to go home and eat cereal on my bed.
Isnael offered to accompany me to the main road to wait for a taxi or a bus to get me back into my part of town. I often left alone from Cuban gatherings in remote areas of town, saying I’d wait at the bus stop, and then called a tourist taxi on my cell phone. But now Isnael walked with me down the middle of empty streets. The broken buildings crouched in the shadows as we moved from one streetlamp’s pool of warm light to another. Incredulous, I asked him what he felt when the spirit came to him. Tonight was the seventh or eighth time that he’d been visited by the ancestors, he told me. A few different spirits had passed through his body.
“You heard when I hit the floor with my fist three times in a row? That was a different spirit coming in,” he explained, cocking his head and looking at me gamely. We had reached the main street, which was silent. I stood with one foot on the cracked curb and one foot in the street.
“But what does it feel like?” I persisted. I don’t think he understood why I needed an explanation. Santería was so much a part of him and his life that its contradictions didn’t interest him. He had framed his life around his religion.
“Nothing, really. I can’t remember what I say or do when the spirit is in me, but I know it’s something. Marielena doesn’t feel anything. She’s a real expert. You could pinch her and she wouldn’t know.” I must have looked still more confused because he continued, gesturing to the sky. “The spirits are everywhere, Julia. They see everything, they have knowledge beyond the human knowledge we have. They see across time, countries, everything. You see the stars up there? How, if they could see us, they’d see Havana, Haiti, Florida; now, years ago, whenever—all at once? It’s kind of like that. Of course, when it’s in me, I can’t understand it because I don’t know what I’m seeing. It’s like I’m awake but not awake at the same time.”
I nodded. After fifteen minutes, a car stopped at my waving hand and I negotiated a price, gave Isnael a hug goodbye, and hopped in. My stomach growled; I hadn’t eaten since mid-afternoon. The farther I got from Marielena’s house, the more any lingering belief I’d had in her predictions faded.
/// Katherine told me she’d never paid taxes in the United States. She was off the radar, she claimed in rum-sodden conversations we had under the Christmas lights that winked from the rebellious plants in her backyard
. When I went to the bathroom, the landscape of her home began to shift and change under my gaze. Spines of books could have been empty, held wads of cash that she didn’t trust to either Cuban or U.S. banks; the planters in which indoor palms thrived, the stretched canvases raised four inches off her walls, the antique bureau she’d bought from a secret vintage furniture vendor down the street—everything could hold something else. Then I’d go back outside and we’d resume our conversation about mutual acquaintances or the political situation and she’d wave her hand clumsily and spray ash across her patio.
In spring 2009, the U.S. Congress voted to loosen Bushera restrictions on Cuban American remittances and travel to the island. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called U.S. policy toward Cuba “failed” and welcomed an offer for fresh talks with Raúl. President Barack Obama declared to the Summit of the Americas in April that “the United States seeks a new beginning with Cuba.” Maybe he’ll drop the embargo, that dream that everyone insisted would change their material circumstances forever, was whispered quickly and accompanied by crossing of chests or a glance heavenward all across Havana in a chorus of aspiration.
There were more foreigners around, too, tourists and journalists and businesspeople. I ran into a man I’d met on a flight over from Mexico, Mike, a towheaded American businessman in his early thirties who said he’d rather raise children in Cuba than back in Illinois. After bumping into one another in Old Havana, we walked down side streets past the back entrances of tourist restaurants where trios played Buena Vista Social Club songs. He knew a spot where we could buy beer at the usual $1 rate rather than the Old Havana $2 markup, so we made a few turns and bought a beer each at an unmarked door. He was laying the groundwork to start an import-export company under the humanitarian loophole of the embargo. He wanted to be on the ground “before the floodgates open,” he said. He traced the life he envisioned: a house on the other side of the bay, where there was more space, a simpler life than those we’d live in the States, community, children who’d play stickball in the streets the way his parents had. There was a Cuban girlfriend hovering behind his statements, though Mike never directly mentioned her. I told him vaguely of the interviews I conducted, though I knew, even as the words flipped out of my mouth, that without a journalist’s visa I should have been more tight-lipped.