And yet Elena’s dream made sense, since in the past two months we had barely left the house except to go to the funeral home, and I knew that the deaths of my grandparents had affected her as much as they had me because she thought of them as family. And then, not everyone is as lucky as I am: I never dream about anything, ever, or at least I never remember my dreams. Elena remembered her dreams in astonishing detail and every morning she would tell me about them, talking about the colours of the clothes, the things she could smell around her, the vividness of the scenery, as though they were movies she had recently watched.
What was most worrying was that, even five months after my grandfather died, Elena was still having horrifying nightmares: the avocado trees in the garden were trying to devour her. The neighbour in the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution who lived in her apartment block wanted to devour her. Everyone was trying to eat her. She would talk about these dreams to me and sometimes to her girlfriends, one of whom suggested she should go and see a babalao. Elena didn’t believe in babalaos or santería or any of that shit but even so she went to see Babalao Alfredo, a famous Ifá priest in Lawton.
‘You have a dark aura. That is why you feel you are being persecuted,’ said the extraordinarily tall black man people called Babalawo Alfredo. He walked us to the door and then, squeezing Elena’s hands, he told her she had to leave here immediately.
‘Leave here? And go where?’
‘To America,’ said the babalao, ‘to Miami. Is that not where your family live? Then you must go there for no good awaits you here.’
Elena thanked the man and we headed back to my house.
‘Don’t listen to that guy, Elena,’ I said, ‘he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ But when I looked into her eyes I saw they were shining and I realised that something inside her had changed, that Alfredo’s words had brought back all the dormant hopes she thought she would never feel again.
That night, I undressed her slowly, with a tenderness I rarely demonstrated. I covered her beautiful body with oil and massaged her every muscle to relieve the tension that for months now had been causing her nightmares. Then I gave her everything I had saved up, my whole erection, every inch of the slippery cock just dying to slide between her legs. That night I didn’t tug her hair, I didn’t spank her arse, I didn’t spit on her like I usually did. Thinking about it, it was the only time we didn’t fuck. We made love, as it’s more elegantly put, and I can tell you now, it was good for me. I wanted to repeat that night of massages, of trembling skin, of whimpers produced not by violence but by the compassion of two souls shielding one another, two bodies sheltering one another, trying to protect each other from the pain caused by the emptiness of the everyday, the inability to understand the young, by everything we are daily confronted by when we open the door. It was good for me, but it was not good for Elena. Her eyes stared at a fixed point, at the huge spider’s web hanging from the ceiling. Her mind was already in Miami. Her body followed a week later. She got in touch with old student friends and they encouraged her to come with them and leave from the Playa Santa Fe. She asked me to go with her. I told her it was all the same: Miami, Havana, London, Paris, it’s all the same, I said. She thought about this but in the end she couldn’t accept that it was all the same, though it saddened her to contradict me, so she said nothing.
In the early hours of the morning, I went with her to the slipway with a wariness that verged on paranoia, glancing around looking for any suspicious characters who might be from the Security Service. Back then, the borders had not been opened and it was illegal to try to leave the country. The raft was little more than a platform made with tractor tyres and some oars. They had no compass, no idea of what the weather would be like, nothing. It looked like a storm might break at any moment.
‘This is madness, Elena. Better a known evil than an unknown good.’
‘I’m sorry, Oscar, I can’t stay here another day. I have to try to be happy somewhere else.’
It was then I realised that my hopes had been castles in the air, illusions which in that moment crumbled to dust. I begged her again to stay, but Elena had made her decision. She kissed me on the lips and I watched her melt into the darkness that instantly swallowed them all.
I went back home feeling more depressed than ever, dragging with me a loneliness that seemed never-ending. All I could do was think about Elena and remember the last words my grandfather had said to me before he died, about the tree that I should plant, about his hope that Elena would bear me lots of children. I wondered if I had made a mistake in not going with her to Miami. But two days later I heard that they had hit a storm while at sea and everyone, including Elena, had been drowned. My heart skipped a beat. For a moment I thought I was having an asthma attack because I couldn’t breathe. I collapsed on the living-room sofa and for a long time I sat there trying to make sense of things. I thought maybe Elena’s nightmares about everyone wanting to eat her had been a signal for her not to leave, that it wasn’t the avocado trees or her neighbour in the CDR who would devour her, but the sharks. Who knows?
All I know is that it would be impossible for me to describe what I felt in the days that followed, when the stars came out and I realised that I was alone in this vastness; those moments when the events of my life flickered past inside me as though fading, as if some mysterious virus were coursing through my veins. It is true that man is born to suffering, but I would never have guessed that in the end I would wind up making do with the pockmarked moon that every day shines down from the heavens. All I know is that within the space of five months I found myself utterly alone. Alone in a house that hurtled on towards privation rather than plenty. Alone in my own cell. Alone, alone. In a country where I served no purpose.
To the Roots
As I said when I began this story, it’s impossible to imagine the man you’ll become when you find yourself alone. I had several options: I could go on breathing, ignore everything that was happening around me, or I could go whoring – because the market for whores was well established by then, and for a few pesos I could find beautiful young women all along Quinta Avenida or on Calle Monte. But I couldn’t get Elena out of my head. I didn’t feel like fucking a whore or waking up alone again.
On the other hand, for a while now Lawton had become a madhouse. Neighbours poked their noses into everyone else’s business, followed each other around like they were spying. Caridad, a member of the CDR, gave me an earful when I built a pigeon loft on the flat roof, then some inspector came and told me to take it down. I tried to bribe the guy, offered him a pile of cash, but he was ruthlessly incorruptible and completely inflexible and in the end the son of a bitch ordered me to rip it down right away and warned me that if I got mixed up in anything else, he’d have me banged up. He was like some retired colonel because he talked like he owned you.
Then there’s the double standards everyone has these days. They think one thing and they say something different, hiding behind words to make their lives easier. I was tired of everything; all I wanted was to know how to deal with the situation I was in. Then one morning, everything was clear to me; suddenly I knew what I had to do.
I found a rope, tied it to the mango tree, but the first time I tried to hang myself, the branch snapped and I was left with a bruise around my neck. I refused to give up. At eight o’clock in the morning, when the traffic on Calzada Dolores was heaving, I sat in the middle of the road and waited. I didn’t get run over by a car but I did manage to get myself thrown in jail. The next day they let me go. I walked into the centre of Havana and climbed to the roof of the FOCSA Building. I thought about the air rushing past my face, imagined the moment when I hit the ground, and I realised I didn’t have the balls to jump. So I took the easy way out: I managed to get hold of twenty haloperidol tablets; I gulped them down and sat on a kerb with my face to the sun. My belly growled like a dog and promptly threw up everything, I coughed a couple of times and just then some woman came over with a glass
of water and saved my life. I had no temperature, no bellyache and no luck killing myself.
That was the fourth night I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t get used to this empty, funereal house. I spent most of the time sitting on my bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking, until I realised that too much thinking was the problem. I got up and on the dresser I saw the letter that my grandma had left me in her will. I read what it said on the envelope: ‘to be opened only at the right time’. I tore it open and found a note inside that read: ‘Don’t let our deaths stop you. Follow the cobweb in the bedroom.’
My eyes focused on the long spider’s web strung between the window and the wardrobe door in my grandparents’ room. Without knowing why, I went to the wardrobe and took everything out: two of my grandmother’s dresses, her high heels, my grandfather’s suit, his two white shirts, his tie and his boots, but I found nothing out of the ordinary. Then I looked at the cobweb again and followed another strand that was connected to the toilet bowl. I didn’t need to investigate the contents, since I could see them. There was a thread connected to the ceiling, another to a plant and a third to a shoe: I carefully checked every thread leading from the web and found nothing special about any of them. The last strand was attached to the drawer of the dressing table. I opened the drawer and found a pig’s foot which turned out to be some sort of necklace, and a note in my grandmother’s handwriting that read: ‘Your happiness is in the amulet. Follow the pig’s foot.’
I looked at the pendant in disgust. The pig’s foot was not dried and shrivelled, in fact seemed to be alive; the veins pulsed, the flesh was red and bled constantly. I fetched a damp cloth to wipe up the blood inside the drawer and on the floor then ran back into the kitchen and threw the gruesome amulet in the bin. I went back to bed after drinking a glass of water with sugar but spent the rest of the night sitting thinking, unable to get to sleep.
At eight o’clock I instinctively rolled over to hug Elena. It was a beautiful day, with the sun bringing out the vivid colours of everything, but all I could think about was some new way to be reunited in death with the rest of my family. As I wandered into the kitchen, I found the bin knocked over and the pig’s foot lying bleeding on the floor.
‘What the fuck is this!’ I said aloud. I grabbed the amulet and held it up at eye level. I got a cloth and mopped up the blood on the floor and took a damp rag and wiped the pig’s foot. Then I took the plunge and fastened the amulet around my neck. Mysteriously, it immediately stopped bleeding and I no longer felt the urge to kill myself. A powerful feeling of adventure overcame me and I felt a strange sensation, as though something were telling me I had to leave Havana for ever, not for Miami, but for Oriente. I tossed some clothes into a backpack, went to the main railway station and caught the first train for Santiago.
As soon as I arrived in Oriente, I headed for El Cobre. I passed a dozen parks, neighbourhoods of little shacks with terracotta pots outside and finally I arrived at a little village near the famous church where Bacardí had met my father Melecio almost a century ago. I had no idea who to ask, but this looked nothing like the place my grandfather had described.
On the corner of a little square, I found a pharmacy where I asked: ‘Could you tell me the way to Pata de Puerco?’ The fat, very black woman on the other side of the counter looked up and shrugged. She had never heard of such a place. ‘Pedrito Blanco is that way, down this way is El Polvorín, and that road leads to Santiago. Over in that direction is Cabeza de Carnero, but that’s a very different beast.’
I thanked the woman and headed for the various places she had mentioned. I combed every one of them, but no one had heard of Pata de Puerco, nor of anyone called José or Oscar or Melecio. ‘The only place round here named after an animal is Ram’s Head,’ everyone told me. ‘Cabeza de Carnero.’ So I caught a streetcar that dropped me off at a station in the middle of nowhere, then I covered several kilometres on foot, hitched a ride on the back of an oxcart and another on the back of a horse-drawn cart until finally I arrived in a little town set in a valley of red earth but it had paved roads and stone houses. It was a simple place like any country town, and yet everywhere there were signs of civilisation that immediately confirmed to me that this village had nothing to do with the godforsaken place Grandpa Benicio told me about, with its communal well, its wooden shacks and no electricity. Here there were schools, clinics, hospitals, sports centres, even a nightclub.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of someone named José Mandinga?’ I asked a well-dressed, rather professional-looking man of about fifty.
‘José Mandinga with a dick like a finger?’
‘No, I’m serious. What about Oscar Kortico?’
‘Oscar Kortico, with a prick like a yo-yo?’
This idiot who thought he was a comedian was busting my balls, so I had to walk away.
I approached an elegant woman with a long face and a little wispy moustache who was walking along the road and asked if she had heard of José Mandinga.
‘The only Mandinga I’ve ever heard of is Melecio Mandinga, the architect who designed Cabeza de Carnero. Have a look at that plaque over there.’ The woman pointed to a wall on which was a rectangular plaque sculpted in high-relief depicting a man with short hair and a noble face; he was smiling.
As I walked over, I felt a shudder run quickly along my spine, up my neck and into my brain. For a split-second, I felt as though I were looking into a mirror. I couldn’t have known that I was the spitting image of my father Melecio, no one had ever told me. The plaque read: ‘Melecio Mandinga, architect of Cabeza de Carnero, did not live to see his dream become a reality, but his work lives on for ever in our hearts.’
After reading this, I walked around for a long time, a little lost, a little gloomy, mostly exhausted by my geographic and genetic disorientation. I came upon a bus stop and had a daydream, or rather with my eyes open I dreamed that a man with gold teeth and an Armani suit driving a limousine was reaching out to shake my hand, introducing himself as Bacardí. ‘My name is Emilio Bacardí,’ he said and invited me to climb into the plush car, where my father Melecio was already ensconced. I saw myself roaming the interior of the limousine, a network of corridors that were actually the hallways of a prison; I could see the bug-eyed prisoners, as I walked determinedly through this labyrinth of muttering voices and nightmares, alert to what was happening in each cell. From time to time my father Melecio would wink at me or Don Emilio would wave me onward and I walked on until I came to the brink of an abyss, since in my dream the prison was like a castle built on the edge of a cliff. There, unable to turn back, I lifted up my arms to glorify the heavens; I tried to speak but I realised, or at least I had the fleeting impression, that someone had sewn my lips together. And yet inside my mouth, I could feel something that was not my tongue or my teeth, but a piece of meat that I tried to swallow as with one hand I fumbled to rip the stitches from my lips. Blood ran down my chin. My gums were numb. When at last I could open my mouth, I spat out the piece of flesh and then groped for it in the darkness. Having found it, and turned it over carefully in my fingers, I realised it was the nose and moustache of Commissioner Clemente.
The scene shifted into another dream in which once again I was strangling the damned cat. I watched the head roll away. I kicked the remains of the body into the bin and then the head suddenly opened its eyes and said: ‘Careful of the consequences, Oscar.’ I woke up with a start. A few kids were playing in the street. They were laughing and playing. From time to time a horse-drawn cart drove by, like the one that had brought me here. I couldn’t stay a moment longer. Night would soon be drawing in.
In the distance I could see the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. I walked in that direction. I walked for miles, until suddenly the paved roads petered out leaving only dirt tracks, which gradually disappeared into a tangle of trees and brambles where the heat was suffocating. I walked without stopping, heading nowhere in particular, but as far as possible from mankind, from the misery of the
city, from the memories of those I loved now dead. Night fell, the darkness was eerie, the mountain gradually grew steeper. A dense thicket of sicklebush blocked my path. There was no way forward. I thought about going back to my old life, but that only made me walk on doggedly, ignoring the thorns long as bayonets ripping at my clothes, burying themselves in my flesh, oblivious to the blood and the pain. On the far side of the sicklebush grove, when I realised that I had left the bustle of the city behind, I lay down on the ground, aching and exhausted. And fell asleep.
Atanasio’s Story
The first thing I noticed was that the pig’s-foot amulet was no longer around my neck. Then I realised that I was lying in a circular clearing the size of an empty football pitch ringed by tall sicklebush like the walls of a fortress, keeping it beyond the reach of men, preserving its mystery. In the middle of the circle it looked as though it had just rained. Clouds were gathered just above the clearing and a fine mist hung in the air, which gave the place a pleasing temperature while beyond the walls of sicklebush the sun still split the stones, the earth was cracked and parched.
The grey sky did not seem to be lit by the sun’s rays, as though day was about to dawn or night about to draw in. At first I thought a tropical storm was brewing but, looking more carefully, I realised that there was something ghostly about this place that had nothing to do with the weather.
‘I must be dreaming,’ I thought as I stared at the throng of animals gathered in the centre of the clearing: wild boar, hutias, deer, crocodiles, all happily sharing the thick black mud rising to cover trees and plants and creepers. Mud coated everything, every animal and tree – the only flash of green came from the feathers of birds as they flitted from branch to branch like lights.
The animals were not startled by my sudden appearance. The crocodiles watched, jaws wide, still as statues; the deer carried on wallowing in the mud as though I were not a man but simply another animal come to shelter from the heat. A pall of thick black smoke hung in the air as if by magic. Looking closely, I saw it came from a shack built of timber and royal palm with a roof of thatched palm leaves, invisible against the mud. On the porch of the house were four stools and a table carefully laid with a chicken stockpot, bread and two bottles of homemade rum, though there was not a soul in sight.
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