Days of Awe

by Achy Obejas

  Perhaps this all makes sense within the vicissitudes of my mother’s life. She is, like my father and me, an only child, but unlike us, who grew up surrounded by firewalls of love, she was raised as if on a winded plain, always exposed.

  Nena never knew her mother, who died giving birth to her in a Havana hospital in 1934. Her father, a taxi driver, never recovered from the shock. He would gape at Nena, his eyes red and bulging, unsure if she was the demon who’d killed his wife or a divine scrap offered to him by the gods, a little piece of her he could keep as a souvenir. As a result, he never knew what to do, whether to cradle Nena or ignore her. He would study for hours on end the bluish mole on her cheek, unsure whether the glaring imperfection was the print of a cloven hoof or just a trademark of mortality.

  By the time Nena was walking, my maternal grandfather was long dead. He was discovered without breath one morning, his inert fingers clamped to a sepia-toned photograph from his wedding day. After his funeral (the photograph still in his hands, even in the family crypt), Nena went to live with relatives who’d take her in by seasons.

  She’d spend fall and winter in Havana with her aunt Graciela and her uncle Frank, going to school with her cousins José Carlos and Gladys, who were just a few years older than she and who would turn out to be friends for life. Her aunt and her family had a modern apartment in the Vedado filled with new American appliances. By the time Nena married my father in 1958 and moved out, her aunt was on the absolute cutting edge of domestic technology: There, in the kitchen, was a fully automatic Whirlpool dishwasher.

  In the spring Nena would be shuttled to Santiago de Cuba, where her grandmother had moved after widowhood and remarriage, and where Nena spent her days hanging out with the black women who worked as servants in the steamy kitchen or doing laundry in the expansive back courtyard—anything to avoid her grandmother’s new husband, a spidery Spaniard who, to the day he died at a sickly ninety-seven, continued to think he was irresistible to women.

  Back then, the Spaniard amused himself by grabbing the help behind my great-grandmother’s back, pinching their buttocks and weighing their breasts as if they were ripe melons. He’d stand in front of Nena, smacking his lips, and tell her he knew how much she longed for him, but that they’d have to wait until she was a little older, because right now, it would hurt too much, and his love for her was too strong to let him cause her pain. But as soon as she was old enough—and they’d know, by the width of her hips, by the color of her aureoles—he’d initiate her into the rites of love, because it should be done by an older man, one with experience and tenderness.

  When Nena shared with the women in her grandmother’s kitchen the old man’s desire, they became her personal spiritual army. They anointed her with herbs, blew cigar smoke at different parts of her body (which gave Nena a dizzying, vertiginous sensation), lit candles, and seemingly emptied every neighboring creek and ravine to provide the fresh, pure water needed to cleanse and redeem her.

  One night, one of the women took one of the Spaniard’s fattest, most glorious white roosters and, holding it by the feet, swept its feathers from Nena’s head to her toes. She felt its heat, the rush of its wings on her skin. Then with one quick snap, the woman twisted the bird’s head off, tossing it on the ground for the lizards and garden snakes. Blood gushed from the bird’s neck, warm and sweet.

  The spring she turned twelve, Nena got her period and watched her body curve and lengthen. That year, she came down with an illness so mysterious that even her aunt Graciela couldn’t find a modern machine to diagnose her. The doctors determined that only the quiet of the seaside, the powers of salt water, could save her. From then on, Nena went early to her summer getaway in Varadero, where her late mother’s cousin, Barbarita, offered refuge as well as splendor.

  Everyone believed flaming-haired, beautiful Barbarita was a spinster, but, in fact, she had a passionate, lifelong relationship with a Chinese-Cuban man named Wang Francisco Le, who worked as a chef for the American-owned International Hotel in Varadero.

  Because neither’s family would have approved, marriage was inconceivable to them. But for more than forty years, the lovers shared a home with an ocean view. Wang Francisco kept a separate hotel room the entire time, for appearances only, in case any of our many relatives should come to Varadero and question their propriety.

  Every now and then Nena would catch glimpses of the gentle devotion between them, the way lanky Wang Francisco would bring sticky rice balls from Chinatown in Havana for Barbarita’s pleasure, offering them to her with his fingers; or how, when they thought Nena fast asleep, they’d curl into the hammock together out in the backyard where Barbarita, a translator by trade, would read to him her attempts to bring poets such as Li Po and Tu Fu alive in Spanish. (The challenge, beyond the obvious, was that these were poets from roughly after the T’ang dynasty, who wrote in an archaic Chinese that Barbarita managed, somehow, to render in modern Latin American Spanish.)

  As the years went by, Barbarita became so adept at written Chinese that, by 1989, when Wang Francisco was long dead, a group of young Chinese-Cubans came in from Havana looking expressly for her. They’d brought with them the original poems by Bei Dao that had been read in Tiananmen Square as tanks rolled and all the world watched, except Cuba.

  “La época del hielo terminó / ¿por qué está todo helado?” 1 she recited to them in Spanish, hers and their native language, so that they finally understood and went back to Havana’s Chinatown talking about the red-haired lady in Varadero who had fed them the tastiest fried rice. (Barbarita’s translations later appeared in an underground newspaper the young Chinese-Cubans published, which was promptly confiscated by government authorities.)

  Curiously, Barbarita encouraged my mother to pursue translation as a career, not from Chinese but from English. The future, she said, was American (in spite of the millions and millions of Chinese people), and she brought home Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner for Nena to convert to Spanish, but my mother got bored fast with Hemingway’s macho exploits and Faulkner’s wry pities—a good thing in the end, because it may well have been her disinterest that helped my father find his calling. When my parents arrived penniless in the United States, they were saved by one of Barbarita’s clients who, in a gesture to her, offered my mother a quick translating job. She passed it off to my father without a second thought, inauspiciously launching his career.

  For Nena, that became even greater proof that her destiny had always been not to be anybody’s daughter, not to have a particular career, not to hold forth on the noble Spanish lineage in her chromosomes, but to be the life partner of Enrique Elías San José, the shy man from Oriente with the blue-black beard and sad eyes who would love her with all his strength and intelligence.

  When they first met she felt no fire, no burning desire at all, nothing more or less than a sense of complete satisfaction. From their first encounter, Nena understood their fate together, intertwining her fingers with his as if they’d been lovers forever, unable to imagine falling asleep at the end of her days in the arms of anyone else. And if he was constantly pulled back to some other time, if voices from centuries before echoed in the chambers of his heart, she was there, in the here and now, which she knew was what really mattered.

  My mother can talk at length about her father, the forlorn taxi driver, her aunt Graciela and her love of gadgetry, and about Barbarita and her Chinese paramour. She can spin charming, funny stories about the myriad relatives she lived with in so many different places, her gangly cousins’ birthday parties and first communions.

  But she can’t say much about her grandmother Marta, the youngest daughter of Haitian slaves, who saved her grandfather’s life with a powerful healing spell when he was injured during Cuba’s war of independence in 1898 and whom he rewarded with true love and marriage; or the American confederate veteran who fled to the island after the U.S. civil war, a barrel-chested hunk of man named Charlie Madigan, who entered our bloodstream in the mid-nine
teenth century (through a strong-willed mulata ex-slave); or Logan, the aged British pirate, who retired to Havana in the late 1700s, shortly after the British invasion of Cuba, gardening in the profuse wilderness of what is now courtly Miramar, and bred dozens of children with his island-born wife, keeping our legacy alive.

  My mother cannot dip back in her genetic pool and claim anything or anyone, because it is all marvelously distant to her, as fanciful and irrelevant as Athena bursting from the head of Zeus. When I sat her down one day and spread before her long columns of dates and names of people who had collaborated over time to create her and me, she laughed nervously, asking questions about why the Mormon church should happen to have so much genealogical information about Cubans—“Isn’t that odd? Do you trust it?”—rather than expressing interest in any of the characters that popped up like massive buds on her extensive and complicated family tree.

  Perhaps the biggest surprise of all was the quiet revelation that my mother’s family, like my father’s, came from Seville, and that like them, they were Jewish, too.

  I would like very much to affirm that, to shout it out, because it would give me the matrilineal stamp I’m missing. But the truth is that I’ve never formally staked a claim, or ever will—not only because of my own adverse reaction to organized religions and the concept of legitimacy, but because it would be untrue: My mother’s family was Jewish once, but it’s been hundreds and hundreds of years since they made a conscious decision to convert.

  Years before the Inquisition, in the church records of Spain, these Abravanels were baptized, had communion, confirmed their souls to a Christian god, and married with vows that evoked the blessings of Jesus. When they died, it was not a haham—a rabbi— but a priest who stood over them in their final moments.

  Perhaps at some point their conversion was coerced, like that of my father’s family. Maybe after the passing of some particularly anti-Semitic law—legal codes that prohibited Jews from owning property, or that banned them from emigrating—it was more a conversion of convenience. They would observe Christian laws, eat fish on Fridays, and rest on Sundays. They would attend church and learn Latin prayers.

  But at some point, these Abravanels not only took on Christian rites, they began to drop Jewish ceremony. They had to work Fridays, so the lighting of kabalat shabat candles went by the wayside. To avoid pork elicited suspicion, so why not a little bite? If Pesaj was forbidden in its Jewish form, why not Christianize it? Surely, if they had to, thirty-six Jewish saints could fit snugly into one Christian archangel. The greater evil would be to perish from the earth.

  Who knows what generation it was that could no longer intone Sh’ma Ysra’el, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai ehad—never mind understand that those six words carried the essential credo of Judaism. At some point Jews like these Abravanels were no longer anusim, but real converts. Their zeal for Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, for Saint Paul and the Apostles, would give them a chance at entry to the professions, betrothals to nobility, the reward of knowing whatever riots were spawning in Seville and Toledo had nothing to do with them. Eventually, they were no longer anusim—coerced—but Catholics as morbid and prim as Ferdinand and Isabella.

  At the point that the first Abravanel landed in Cuba in 1620— in Havana, the seat of the Spanish Viceroy—he was not running from Spain, but commissioned as a counselor to the new Captain General. That same year, as the Mayflower was sailing into history, Havana was already more than two hundred years old.

  Anton Abravanel arrived in the Cuban capital after several hundred houses had been leveled by fire, and where prostitution, gambling, and graft were as common as rain. The city was in a constant state of alarm, the lookout on the bay signaling the highest state of alert every time a ship with a British, French, or Dutch flag sailed into view. Because news traveled slowly to the colonies, the habaneros never knew with whom they might be at war, a condition, I’m sure, that has been genetically encoded into our brains.

  For the first few years, Anton Abravanel experienced heat, mosquitos, and a sugary sexual exhaustion with Cuban women of many hues, always making it a little breathlessly to his meetings with the Captain General. Then one late summer day in 1626, thirty Dutch ships appeared at the mouth of Havana harbor. That’s when Anton was forced to focus, to consider the advice he had to give to his employer. For a week, the Dutch hovered, setting off spectacular fireworks of artillery every time a ship tried to nose its way into Havana.

  Knowing that the Spanish silver fleet was due at any moment, the Captain General, one Don Lorenzo de Cabrera—corregidor of Cádiz, field marshal of Spain, and knight of the order of Santiago— sent word to warn them. The strategy had been devised by his counselor, Anton Abravanel, who proudly whispered it to his mulata of choice for the evening, not knowing her true love was an Italian sailor under the command of the Dutch sailing legend Piet Hein, sitting in his ship just outside Havana harbor. The tip proved fruitful for the Dutch, who chased the Spanish flotilla into Matanzas Bay and seized more than eighteen thousand pounds of silver, valued at more than twelve million Dutch guilders, one of the biggest prizes ever captured in the Caribbean.

  A troubled and remorseful Anton Abravanel never revealed his sin to his superior, of course, but he knew: If his mistake were found out, it would be attributed not just to stupidity but to his latent Jewishness, still visible to all in his otherwise illustrious surname (he kept it because, in business, it still had a certain weight, Inquisition or no Inquisition). To make up for his miscalculation, Anton spent the rest of his days repenting and confessing to brown-robed friars. He stopped dallying and married a proper Spanish girl, a niece of the Captain General imported from Spain just for him. He went to mass daily, took communion, and instructed his children in the strictest adherence to Catholic belief, all in the hope of erasing the awful smudge on his soul.

  But as Anton’s children and grandchildren grew up in Cuba, their Catholicism eventually became as corrupted as the Abravanels’ initial Judaism. The Church of England was a passing fancy with a lasting effect. Freemasonry established a foothold in Havana and sucked in almost all the prominent families, including the male Abravanels. Santería and voodoo thrived in secrecy, and shrines to the Virgin of Charity began sporting glasses of water, dead chickens, bottles of rum and firewater.

  By the time my mother met my father, her religious legacy had come full circle: When he worriedly, and in his own convoluted and roundabout way, confessed to her that he was not really a Christian in spite of appearances, she had a dim memory, a sense of what he was talking about as something long renounced.

  There was no question that for their union to work, my father had to be at ease. He was not a man who found comfort in faith but who felt its burden, its constant imbroglio. A converso or anusim girl—virtually impossible to find in Cuba anyway—might have inadvertently fueled resentment, an out-in-the-world Jew would have posed a crisis of identity, and a devout Christian would have suffocated him. But a lax Catholic, a girl who prayed while arranging glasses of water, who knew there were mysteries in life that could not always be explained and who could accept them and his often fruitless efforts to comprehend them . . . she was perfect.

  Surely Enrique knew from my mother’s name—the distinctly Sephardic Abravanel—that there must have been a Jewish part of her somewhere. Maybe he imagined their bloodlines going back, long ago kin meeting in a Seville market over a bin of mangoes imported from the New World, feeling a powerful affinity for each other, not understanding that their future was to produce them, to rescue him.

  When I explained my mother’s genealogical charts to my father in the basement of our Chicago home, closed off from the world as if I were about to decipher kabalistic secrets, he smiled and slowly lowered his lids, his face red from nothing but joy, then leaned back, humming, humming, as if he were praying in Jerusalem, swaying there ecstatically before the Western Wall.

  VI

  To this day, nearly forty years later, I don’t know how my par
ents did it, how they were able to turn their backs and say good-bye to their home, to Havana, to that strange island of orchids bursting red and hummingbirds the size of bees.

  I know there was a panic swirling in the streets that I will never be able to fully comprehend. But that act of departure—tucking into pockets birth certificates, a handful of American dollars, a particularly poignant letter from a loving friend; deciding to bring along a delicate plaster goddess, as plain as any; and never knowing whether they’d ever be able to return—all that still escapes me. I can’t imagine standing before the mirror with that knowledge, freezing that terrible image of myself at that moment.

  I consider my parents’ flight and wonder what I would have done. Perhaps I might have gone to say farewell to my great-grandfather Ytzak, or at least tried to convince the old man to join us—not necessarily for his sake but for ours. Maybe, in their place, I would have grabbed a napkin from a favorite cafe, for the pure feel of it, for its coffee stains, for the pungent smell of its fresh oysters from Sagua.

  I certainly would have taken a moment to look out from the Malecón, to measure the emptiness from the rough shore to the horizon. I would have wanted the time to consider how many darkening butterfly lilies, how many revolutionary triumphs and drowned balseros it would take to fill the gap.

  I have heard from many, many people that on a clear night in Havana, you can stand on the Malecón, look north, and see the lights of Key West shining like a beacon. And I’ve strained, I’ve rolled up my jeans and leaned over the salty rocks at low tide—red and olive seaweed clinging to the dead coral—and stared ahead into the tenebrous night until orange and amber flashed in front of my eyes. But I’ve never had a glimpse of that tiny torch that others see, only blackness, only the same wilderness, the same phantoms that my father saw the night he left Cuba.