by Achy Obejas
“Hey,” the guy at the window yelled at me. “No one’s going to remember those buildings. They’re new.”
But I remembered them, I was sure of it. My mother would remember them. I could picture the view through the bars of our terrace, the way they served as a frame for those other lives, always louder and more interesting than anyone else in the neighborhood. Didn’t my father once save a cat trapped on the stairway across the street during a hurricane? Or were all these memories like those of the Greek columns, sweet but invented?
“Those buildings were built by the revolution,” the guy at the window said. He sneered: “Long after you were gone, all of you.”
I don’t know how he knew, what he saw from his perch that gave away the truth of my origins and our subsequent escape. Why couldn’t he think I was a Spanish tourist like everyone else? I stepped across the street and shot a picture of our apartment from my new vantage point.
“Hmm . . . these buildings were built in 1960,” said a voice behind me.
I turned around fast. Sitting there on the steps and seemingly made of smoke was a wan old man in a red shirt, a small cup of coffee in hand. He had dark, dark rings around his eyes, so dramatic he looked like Theda Bara, the silent-movie queen. His eyes were huge, round, and his right pupil was misty, as if a cloud had permanently settled there. He was skinny, with long legs stretching out of baggy shorts.
“We left in sixty-one,” I said. “I was sure I remembered them.”
He nodded. “Yes, they were built by the government,” he said. “But that building there”—he pointed to the one with the man at the window—“that one’s prerevolution. That one’s privately constructed, privately owned since 1932.” He twisted a bit on the step, rearranging his bones. “Take a picture of it, okay?” he said.
“Yes,” I said, measuring the distances. “I used to live there, next door, in the third-floor apartment.” I pointed at our empty balcony, its crumbling ledge.
Suddenly, the old man brightened and grinned. He had white, white teeth, real shiners. For a moment, he looked black, mulato. “Then you must be . . . Alejandra, right? Enrique and Nena’s daughter?” Before I had a chance to respond, he slapped his thigh with his free hand, almost spilling the coffee in the tiny cup he held in the other. “The revolution’s own! You were the skinniest baby I ever saw. You looked like a slug, like something born by mistake—not unlike the scraggly rebels themselves! Look at you now!” He whistled appreciatively, snapping his loose hand in the air in one quick motion.
I laughed uneasily. I was unnerved by the fact that he knew me, knew my birthday, knew I shared the same life span as the island’s most recent experiment. I felt ephemeral. “I’m afraid I don’t remember you, I don’t remember your name,” I said.
“Not important, not important,” he said, still fidgeting, his right eye rolling around in his head like spilled milk. “I used to own your building, too. I used to rent to your father and mother.”
“Really? Then you’re Moisés Menach, my father’s friend from Oriente?” They were supposed to be the same age, yet this man looked so much more worn, so much older than my father.
Moisés nodded again, pleased with himself. The way he slowly closed, then barely lifted his eyes had a distinct, elegant arrogance I recognized from my father’s own gestures. I bent down to kiss Moisés but he turned his head a bit, more out of embarrassment than anything else. He smelled of coffee and tobacco. His free hand wrapped around mine, tremulous but strong.
I knew from my father that Moisés Menach had come to Havana to take care of a house left by an uncle who’d waited forty years to get a visa to the United States. Even though the uncle’s life in Cuba was settled—he was seventy years old, had a family and a small kosher cafeteria on Muralla Street—when the visa finally arrived he felt obliged to complete his journey, packing everything up and boarding a steamer straight for New York.
Moisés tried to keep the cafeteria going for a while but failed miserably. He was lucky, though: In his anxiety, he’d begun to play the lottery and one day unexpectedly won a small fortune. With that, he sold off what was left of the cafeteria and bought a building next to his uncle’s house—where we eventually lived—and settled into a comfortable life as a private landlord.
“New people moved in after your parents left,” Moisés said, picking up the conversation as if the comings and goings of previous tenants really mattered. “Then they left, too. I don’t remember when I lost that building, not exactly. Somewhere around there. Early. They said I didn’t need two places, I could only live in one. I said, okay. I mean, that made sense. The last family moved out a year ago, I think. Technically, their son, David, lives in your old place. But he’s never around. You can see everything’s boarded up. I think he’s got a girlfriend in Trinidad, that’s what I hear. But he tells people he lives here. He doesn’t want to lose the apartment. I understand that, too.”
He focused his blurry gaze on the house next door. “That house? The one I asked you to photograph? That’s my house. I’m only sitting here because I’m visiting Olguita, my daughter-in-law—actually, my ex-daughter-in-law—I like her, she’s family,” said Moisés, shrugging. “But that house? That’s mine. I have the papers for it in my name from 1950. I legally inherited it. Take a picture, okay? Take a picture and show everybody who used to live here and thinks they’re going to come back and make false claims. These buildings are the revolution’s, but that one there, that’s mine.”
On my return to Cuba a decade later, I ask Moisés about the wrinkled envelope I’d finally handed him in our last moments together that first time around. He grins, his nearly sightless eyes reeling back. Then he goes to a difficult, creaking drawer in a bureau in his unlit and crowded living room and pulls it out, smoothing the stationery with his fingers.
“Moisés,” the letter reads, “this daughter of mine, Alejandra, is precious to me. She is my darling child. When the time comes, tell her everything.” It’s signed: “Your brother, Enrique.”
IX
As the plane sailed into Havana on my first trip back in 1987, I looked out the window in anticipation but saw only black. Cuba doesn’t light up until just before the actual landing: The fleeting illumination, which comes from posts situated far apart on the roads just outside the capital, spills enough of a yellowish glow to indicate a deserted countryside, single-lane routes, thick bush all around. As the plane descends, it’s possible to glimpse the bulky outlines of a few bohios, those picturesque but miserable thatched huts from postcards and jaunty guajiras.
On my return to Cuba after twenty-six years, the plane stumbled on the landing, jerked us around, then groaned to a halt. All the while I felt strangely invulnerable, convinced nothing could happen to me, that in spite of the heart-rending cries from the other passengers, we’d all walk out safely into the warm Cuban rain.
As we stepped to the ground there was an overpowering smell of mildew in the air. Many of our fellow passengers became highly agitated. Most just stood there at first, disoriented, aware only that they were firmly in Cuba for the first time in so many years, their hands shaking, tears coursing down their cheeks. Some dropped to their knees and kissed the tarmac, wails of despair coming from them until other passengers yanked them back on their feet. The uniformed soldiers from the Ministry of the Interior looked on with a bland acceptance, as indifferent to them as to the precipitation.
I grabbed my carry-on bag and marched around the exile commotion, falling into lock-step with my party of activists and politicians, most of whom were Puerto Rican and American. There were less than a handful of returning exiles in our group. I looked through my purse for my passports, unsure which—U.S. or Cuban—to hand to the customs official.
This was the incident I was thinking about later, when I told Estrella everything had already happened to me: What could be more dramatic than returning to the place of your birth and feeling nothing, absolutely nothing, but the slightest shiver of an echo from a bottom
less pit?
There are two things I remember most about that trip. The first is how I clung to every privilege and habit that separated me from the islanders. I didn’t claim to be American; I understood that to be impossible, and I didn’t want it anyway.
But I took taxis everywhere, standing defiantly on any sun-drenched street corner holding my arm out in the air to get their attention. Cubans couldn’t afford taxis then—still can’t, really— and I was haughty, impatient about the entire transaction. I’d yell out taxi, in perfect English, instead of tahk-see, like the natives. I’d wave one of my singularly illegal dollars if I had to, soaking in their envy; they glared at me with just a little bit of hatred. I wore black every single day, not out of mourning, not out of any fashion or political motive, but because black is not a color anybody wears in the tropics; black absorbs the heat and attracts mosquitos but also sucks up sweat and other stains without leaving a mark.
During all my interpreting in Havana, whenever I had to negotiate between individuals, I’d always let them know I was partial to the English-speaker. I’d indicate this with my body, by leaning or standing closer to the American, by deferring or simply gazing at him or her more intimately than the Spanish-speaker.
Even though I ignored the island Cubans, my message was for them: I have nothing in common with you (who can’t answer simple questions without feeling compelled to spew forth frothy commentaries), but with them, with the taller, healthier northerners (the ones who communicate efficiently, who aren’t ashamed to admit when they don’t have an answer). Regardless of what language I was speaking, what words I was pronouncing, my mouth was filled with rocks and stones and broken glass.
Occasionally, I’d step out of the conversation with a comment or beneficial aside, but it was always for the sake of our tour group, never the hosts. If a local Cuban asked me a direct question, I’d quickly translate the words into English like an automaton, and if they protested that it was meant for me personally, I’d define the rules of my job: That I was invisible, that I had no opinion or judgment, that I was there simply to convert one language into another and that they should never address me as an individual but always focus their pronouncements on the other person.
“These are not my words,” I explained. “I have no words of my own here.”
The other memory is a scene at Moisés’s home.
When I met him, I was curious, of course, about Moisés himself, about his survival in Cuba, how it might have intersected with what our lives would have been if we’d stayed. This is one of the inescapable things about being born in Cuba: the life that was somehow denied by revolution and exile, our lives in the subjunctive—contingent, emotionally conjured lives of doubt and passion. Everything is measured by what might have been, everything is wishful—if Fidel hadn’t triumphed, if the exiles had won at Bay of Pigs, if we hadn’t left. I have never questioned why the subjunctive exists in Spanish, with its cultures of yearning, but neither have I had reservations about its absence in English, with its cool confidence.
I was also curious about the experiences my parents had had before me. Who doesn’t wonder about the people who brought them into existence, about who they were back when they were young, their dreams embryonic bursts of shapeless colors in their sleep?
I’d always imagined my mother as something of a marvel, as the object not so much of men’s comments on the street but of an ache inside them. She would have been desired, not for the sake of possession but of union. My mother, I assumed, was the kind of woman men (and women, too) dream about, not as an adventure but for eternity. My mother, I thought, was the subjunctive personified.
“She took your breath away,” Moisés said unembarrassed, his eyes looking off into the distance as if he could see her again through his milky screen, radiating. “She made you hurt all over.”
And my father? Moisés had known him since they were only months old, two little soiled worms screaming for their mothers’ breasts. I imagined my father awkward and pretty as a boy, good-hearted and easily embarrassed, not yet defensive and pompous about his intellect—a youngster capable of a hearty laugh, of climbing a tree just to see how high he could go, a child concerned more with wonder than with meaning.
“Your father, yes, well, he’s a complicated man,” Moisés said.
Upon our meeting, Moisés invited me home with him to the highceilinged house in which he lived with his wife, Ester; his divorced son, Ernesto (like a few others of that early generation in Cuba, prophetically named in honor of Che Guevara); his daughter, Angela, and her husband, Orlando (whom I realized immediately was the disagreeable man yelling at me from Moisés’s upstairs window), and their three daughters—Deborah, Yosemí, baby Paulina—and teenage son, Rafa; and Ester’s father, Rodolfo, an ancient mummy-like mass who sat before the TV all day, whether there was anything on the tube or not. Later I found out that he claims to have not slept since 1961, when the Americans bombed the air bases before invading Playa Girón.
Inside the large house, Ester—a warmly cushioned woman with large, comfortable breasts to which she held me as if I were a long-lost daughter—trembled and wiped away tears. “Alejandra, I’ve dreamt about you!” she said, although she has never described a single nocturnal vision to me.
A handsome fellow with the same lagoons under his eyes as his father, Ernesto immediately brought out a bottle of rum and poured glasses for everybody. He pulled ice trays without dividers from the freezer and ran them under water to loosen the large white rectangles. When they popped from the trays, he wrapped them in dish towels and banged them against the kitchen counter until they shattered into brittle spears. Then he undid the towels and carefully picked out the biggest chunks for me.
When we returned to the living room, Rafa and his sisters, all with large curious Menach eyes, stared at me from their perches on and around the heavy mahogany furniture. Raven-haired Yosemí held the slobbering Paulina to her shoulder.
“Were you really born on the same day the revolution triumphed?” she asked accusingly.
“Absolutely, absolutely!” Moisés said happily, not giving me a chance to answer. “She was—is!—our revolution’s first new life!”
I cringed. We never talked about my birthday back in Chicago, just celebrated it on its own—not even in tandem with the new year—as if it stood alone. When I finally shared the coincidence of my nativity with my friends, it was always ironic, or embarrassing. Now here was Moisés patting me heartily on the back as if I’d had a choice.
The Menach front room served as the all-activity center of the house. The TV was there, as was Rodolfo, the patriarchal zombie, and the large family-size dining room table. There were several old wooden rockers, one with a broken arm, and a folding chair. On one wall hung a metal picture frame with the winning lottery ticket that had helped Moisés become a landlord in the fifties. The stub floated on plain white paper, its numbers, though large, obscured by wear and a layer of moisture under the glass. Its edges were orange, as if paper could rust. Next to it was a startlingly mature portrait of Orlando, also framed, which I would later learn was Deborah’s handiwork.
Angela’s surly husband, Orlando, an unshaven forty-year-old with a slight paunch, sat (still shirtless) on the ladder to an improvised second floor, a barbacoa, as the islanders call the rickety loft spaces. The kids slept up there, where the adults could barely stand. Bronze-skinned Orlando guzzled his rum noisily. Angela, thin as a bird and swarthy like her father, smiled as she strolled back to the kitchen, just off the dining area, in order to help Ester prepare a welcoming meal for me (I’d protested, to no avail).
“I thought you were Jewish,” I said to Moisés, noting that at least one of his children had been named for someone who, at the time of his birth, had been very much alive. From what I understood, this fell outside of Jewish custom.
“Of course we’re Jews!” Moisés Menach said proudly, pointing to the mezuzah tacked just inside his door. (I’d always thought these were dis
played outside, but Moisés later explained that was just tradition, not law, and that many Sephardim kept theirs inside—a legacy, I quickly surmised, of the Inquisition.)
When I expressed my confusion with his children’s names, he told me the Sephardim aren’t very strict about naming children after living relatives. “Besides, in Cuba, we’re Cubans,” he said, smiling, even his misty eye twinkling. “And here, we are always naming our children for heroes, heroes who are very much alive and can serve as examples.”
Ernesto puffed up his chest, jokingly trying to radiate a bit of his namesake. Then he gasped, comically faking one of Che’s famous asthma attacks. The kids laughed. Angela, poking her head out of the kitchen, rolled her eyes and waved her hand in dismissal. Orlando looked on darkly.
As all this was going on, neighbors and friends came in and out of Moisés’s house, some curious about the visitor he was entertaining, others simply continuing their routines. Moisés’s door, I would later learn, was always open: People bounced in to borrow tools, to play or flirt with Rafa or one of the girls, to gossip and hang out, to watch TV. Whatever food was available was shared, whatever rum ran free.
Sometimes Rodolfo, the mummified grandfather, would startle everyone by leaping out of his chair and angrily draping a worn bedsheet over himself and the TV set, which he then turned way down so only he could hear, and only if he was within inches of its speaker.
“But what happens,” I asked Moisés, “if the heroes you name your children after disappoint you later, if their humanity is evidenced through a horrible act, like cowardice or corruption?”
Moisés, who was helping set the table for dinner, stopped; he held a plate in midair, its chipped edge pointed at me. “That . . . would . . . never . . . happen,” he said, spacing his words out, one by one, for emphasis. His eyes opened wide, revealing more and more of the whites, which only underscored the deep black patches underneath. “That would never happen,” he said again, quickly.