Days of Awe

by Achy Obejas

  “But it did, didn’t it?” I insisted, as if arguing with my own father. “I mean, in the early days of the revolution, didn’t some people name their kids Huber, after Huber Matos?”

  Matos, a commander in the revolutionary army, had split with Fidel early on and ended up spending most of his adult life as a political prisoner in Cuba. He is a fading figure, as much in the diaspora as in Cuba itself, but for exile children like me he was often portrayed as the “good” revolutionary, particularly because of his break and imprisonment. Eventually Fidel released him to exile in Miami, where it was thought he’d spark a counterrevolutionary movement. But instead, Matos virtually disappeared into the comfort of his family, preferring to spend his time catching up with his children and grandchildren and becoming a rich old man.

  As I was making my case, the neighbors all seemed to be listening through the windows. A round woman with avocado green curlers in her hair nodded approval from the warm dusk outside. An old man with no teeth stood at the door and shook his head, dismayed. Rodolfo, under a bedsheet now, rolled the TV’s volume button from side to side, so that the sound came in muffled, cascading waves.

  Just then, a beautiful girl waltzed into the house, unconcerned with the conversation. She was wearing a nearly transparent cotton dress that revealed white panties against her caramel-kissed skin. Because she looked thirteen or fourteen years of age, at first I assumed she was a friend of Deborah and Yosemí. They had the same smoothness of cheeks, the same early spring breasts, the same Cupid’s bow lips. What distinguished her immediately was a certain coquettishness.

  I speculated that Deborah, who had curly saffron hair, clear eyes, and brown skin like her father, and even the terribly serious and pale Yosemí, were probably suppressed in the company of their kin, that they would shine as brightly in a different setting. But to my surprise, they greeted the new girl with a vague indifference. Only an excited Rafa welcomed her, folding his teenage body into a corner of the room to create a sliver of space between himself and the wooden wardrobe so she could watch the debate that had ensued between Moisés and me. When the girl acquiesced to Rafa’s silent offer, he turned a deep crimson.

  I watched her as I spoke: the way she looked at me, wholly unimpressed, her limbs carelessly resting on the edge of the wardrobe, impervious but not unaware of Rafa’s suffering behind her. She was, I realized immediately, an extraordinary girl.

  It was not Moisés, though, who picked up the gauntlet I’d thrown about Huber Matos. “No one! Not one person is named after Huber!” said Orlando, Angela’s husband, a black-haired gentile who, I learned later, had refused to convert to Judaism upon marriage but was accepted into the family anyway, in large part because his support for the revolution was as feverish as Moisés’s. Indeed, Angela had met him when they were teens, during his turn at neighborhood watch following Moisés’s, when he’d come early, out of enthusiasm both for the job and for the older man’s conversation. In the years since, Orlando had taken enthusiastic part in every revolutionary project that came his way. As an economist, he was in the vanguard of state planning for everything from combat supplies for Cuba’s excursions to Angola and other far-flung places to nutritional calculations in order to ration foods in a healthy and equitable way.

  Now Orlando poured himself, and me, another glass of rum. “You go out there and talk to everybody in Cuba—you’ll find lots of people named Ernesto, Camilo, Vladimir—but no one is named Huber. Why? Because people knew.” He sneered at me, lifted his glass in the air, and with an unexpected tip to the strange girl, gulped down the sweet drink.

  “You have to choose your heroes very carefully,” Ernesto said. “I lucked out—my namesake died before he had a chance to become an asshole!” As he spoke, he laughed, ducking his father’s light slap. Nonetheless, the neighbors quickly scattered, the toothless man gumming furiously as he ran. “Kidding. Just kidding!” Ernesto protested, but they were gone. “It’s one way to clear a room, isn’t it?”

  “You see, Ale, they have no respect, you know? No respect,” said Moisés, but it was clear that, though it really bothered him that his children might feel differently about the revolution, this was all familiar territory, games played a thousand times before.

  In the corner, the strange girl sighed, indicating her boredom. Within minutes, she had vanished. Rafa, with his beautiful angel’s face, kicked the wall behind him with his heel, his hands useless, buried in his bottomless pockets.

  Soon Angela and Ester emerged from the kitchen with a feast: a large kettle overflowing with arroz con pollo, plates of sliced icy cucumbers and ripe tomatoes, fried plantains and a long, warm loaf of bread. I wanted to thank them but I was speechless. Moisés had announced me as a dinner guest as we walked through the door, not giving his family much time to prepare for much of anything, and yet here was this banquet, this jubilee. Tears welled in my eyes.

  “Oh no, no, don’t get emotional now,” said Ernesto in his warm, friendly way. I immediately wondered why Olguita, his ex-wife, had divorced him.

  “You’re family, mi vida,” said Ester, patting my hand as she positioned herself at the head of the table.

  I tried to compose myself as the kids dropped into their assigned seats: Serious Yosemí and cheery Deborah on either side of their mother, Rafa next to his grandfather. Rodolfo, the mummy, remained static in front of the noisy TV, the bedsheet over his head.

  “Angela . . . por favor . . .” said a drunken, smiling Orlando as he teetered next to his chair with his empty glass. He must have been attractive once, I thought, but he was so clearly in decline now. “I need something to settle my stomach. A glass of milk.”

  There was a general protest at the table, even though this was years before milk rationing. Angela, who’d struck me as goodhumored and confident all day long, angrily put her silverware down and got up. As she disappeared, defeated, into the kitchen, the agitation continued. Everyone was clearly upset, although Orlando just stood there, propped against the chair, smirking as he waited. When Angela returned, she handed him a half full glass of milk. He skeptically examined it in front of the entire family but did not taste it, just set it down at his place setting, then arranged himself in his chair.

  “You’re not going to drink it?” protested Angela.

  “Enough, enough,” demanded Moisés, waving his hands as if he were gathering something rare and beloved to him. He said something to Ester in French and she nodded. Everybody calmed down, at least enough to lower their heads for a moment. Ernesto winked at me and smiled.

  “All right now . . .” Without much more fanfare, Moisés began the blessing: “Baruch attah Adonai, elohainu melach ha olam, ha motzi—”

  “Blessed is the god who brought us arroz con pollo!” exclaimed a playful Ernesto, reaching across to serve himself from the steaming rice and chicken dish. Moisés groaned. Ester squeezed his shoulder for comfort, whispering again in a French I recognized as slightly fractured, put together with distinct Spanish and Turkish inflections.

  An austere Yosemí took my plate and began to serve me heaps of the delicacy. “Tell me when it’s enough,” she said, her eyebrows linked together across her forehead.

  Ester poured water from a tin into everybody’s mismatched glasses, Angela plucked tomato slices and cucumbers into a plate for her grandfather. All the while, everyone talked, laughing and spilling things without regard. Ernesto had just begun to refill the rum when Orlando got up abruptly, glass of milk in hand, and withdrew to the back of the house.

  “Enough,” I said to Yosemí long after she’d scooped up more than I could eat, and more than anyone should get if the meal were to be evenly distributed. “In fact, too much—let’s put some back,” I said, but no one would hear of it, everyone loudly demanding that I eat what was on my plate.

  “Are you disparaging my arroz con pollo?” asked Ester, pretending to be offended.

  I know it shouldn’t have hit me the way it did. It wasn’t that big a deal. But suddenly,
it was as if the force of the ocean had been contained in my chest. To my surprise, I was crying—huge, heaving sobs.

  “Excuse me,” I said, getting up from the table, unnerved. Everyone complained again, dismayed by my emotions. A gentle Deborah handed me a white handkerchief and I turned from the table and blew my nose.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” said Ernesto, taking hold of my arm.

  I didn’t realize how much rum I’d had until I began my journey toward the bathroom in the back of the house (they wouldn’t let me at the one near the dining room, claiming plumbing problems). Everything swayed; I was wobbly. My eyes weren’t used to the darkness yet and I kept seeing sparks.

  Instinctively, I reached out for a wall to support me but found that the long corridor to the bathroom opened without doors along the family’s three bedrooms, all in a row. The furniture was heavy and somewhat monstrous in its elegance. The partitions between the rooms didn’t go all the way to the ceiling but left an open space of several feet of air. Everything was tidy but crowded, with too much bric-a-brac for my spare northern tastes.

  I was horrified to realize Moisés and Ester, Orlando and Angela, and Ernesto and whomever he brought home (his must have been the smallest room, the one with the cot that took up all the space in what may have once been a utility area of some sort) heard every whisper and whimper, every creak in each other’s bed. Apparently, it was true about the old man’s insomnia, since there was no place for him to lie down and sleep. Maybe, I wondered, they just left him in front of the TV, like a set piece.

  By the time I got to the far side of the house, I’d adjusted to the shadows. I stepped into the dimness of what must have once been the servants’ bathroom without turning on the light and found the sink. I splashed heavy, icy water on my face and looked for my reflection in the mirror. Its surface was broken by veins of ruptured mercury. My hair danced, electrified by the humidity like my mother’s when she lived in Cuba.

  I’d just pulled my panties down at the seatless toilet when I heard a rustling outside in the patio. At first I thought it was a breeze playing with the trees, but then I heard footsteps, heavy and deliberate, followed by a lighter, friskier walk.

  “Here, sit here,” I heard a husky voice say. It was Orlando, not drunk at all but meekly instructive. He moved something from one place to another, breaking a twig under his foot.

  I quickly tugged my panties up, without peeing, and looked around the room for a view of the outdoors. Sure enough, high up near the ceiling, a horizontal window was propped open to let the air circulate. I scrambled up, balancing myself on the lid of the toilet tank, and poised myself at the window.

  I had to use both hands to hold on to the sill and, as it was, my eyes were just barely able to see through the small space between the ledge and the frosted pane. But there below me, amid the thick bushes and dozens of tub-sized flower pots from which large yellow leaf papaya trees waved, Orlando poured the milk from his glass into a small puddle on the seat of an old metal patio chair. He was now hidden from the back door of the house by a thick hedge. The milk glistened in the moonlight.

  Then the girl—the same stunning girl who’d left so bored hours ago—parted the greenery and stepped in beside him. Her dark curls floated in the air. She lifted her white dress. Her underwear was missing and a plush patch of black appeared between her legs. Then slowly, regally, looking Orlando in the eye the entire time, the girl lowered herself to the milk, her pubic hairs catching drops of white.

  Orlando knelt in front of her like a supplicant as she dipped again and again. She arched her body, grinding her pubic bone into the cream, then he spread the girls’ legs and lowered his lips to her sex. She spasmed, tossed her head back and relaxed into his mouth.

  Once, the girl looked up, as if to the star-filled sky, and found my blue-gray eyes instead, glistening, no doubt, like a wild animal’s. She smiled with quiet surprise but did nothing more than stroke Orlando’s hair with her hand. I smiled back, strangely calm, as I watched her caress her lover’s stubbly cheek and play with the nappy hair on his head. He continued lapping until she wrapped her legs around him and trapped him there, immobile.

  When I exited the bathroom, my face was flushed. As soon as Moisés and his family saw me, they assumed I’d gotten sick. They beseeched me to sit down, to drink water, to get some fresh air (I steered them outside through the front and away from the back patio, oddly protective of Orlando and the girl). They apologized profusely, thinking it was their meal that had affected me so. Standing beside me at the door of the house, Deborah gently stroked my hair to soothe me.

  I told Moisés’s family I was exhausted and strung out and just needed to get back to the hotel. But the entire clan seemed to moan in unison. I said I’d simply catch a cab but they wouldn’t hear of it: Orlando, who had inherited a ’57 Buick from his father (and was the only one who could drive it), would take me back.

  I quickly declined, of course, terrified of the scandal that would break out if they went to find him and discovered what I knew would be his compromising position. I reminded them he hadn’t been feeling well either.

  “That’s okay,” said Orlando, suddenly at the front door of the house. He was draining the glass of milk, unhurried but without swagger; there was no mark of victory anywhere on him. “I’m better now.”

  Orlando’s Buick was a sloping tank that jerked in the lower gears. We pulled out to the street with a series of neck-snapping lunges, for which Orlando apologized in a barely audible, embarrassed voice.

  We were not far from the Habana Libre, this I knew. The hotel sits on a well-lit strip in the Vedado, near the University of Havana and surrounded by plenty of traffic. So I was a bit startled when I realized Orlando was driving away from the city, onto the forbidding roads I’d seen from the plane as we landed. There would be no farewell bash for me, no chance of meeting Fidel. As we drove on, there were fewer and fewer lights, a vast wasteland.

  We traveled wordlessly for maybe ten, fifteen minutes. The wind whipped in through the open windows of the car, my hair nipping at my cheeks and neck. Orlando stared straight ahead, intent on the road. There were bluish shadows under his pale brown eyes. I noticed his nose was slightly crooked in profile.

  The motor grunted when he pulled to the side of the road, hissing before its final surrender. Out in the night, crickets continued their racket, lightning bugs flared as they circled about. Somewhere water gushed, slapping the shore.

  I closed my eyes when Orlando touched my lips with his fingers. These were unburdened by labor, silky and tapered as if shaped by a manicurist. They had a strong, pungent smell, like a river swollen in summer. His lips fell on mine and there, in the slightly sour aftertaste in his mouth, I savored the richness of the beautiful girl.

  When Orlando parted my legs and tried to lower his head, I resisted: I licked the stubble on his chin, bit at his lips. In response, he plunged his fingers into me, as agile as any tongue.

  X

  There was a time perhaps when everyone spoke the same language, before the debate about whether it was the object or the sound that came first. Back then, no one cared if we imitated nature’s noise in our own way, or whether we imposed ourselves on the world, reducing its mighty possibilities to our limited vocabulary.

  When we were of one language, no one argued about whether tree or árbol best fit those leafy creatures wrapped in rough bark out in the woods. Everything was understood, there was unanimity in the universe. I’ve often imagined that we must have spoken a language of the senses, a speech strictly of vowels: ooooh-aaaah-iiiiiii.

  It is not so limiting to speak in these open-mouthed ways; there are a myriad subtleties. Think about newborns, about the sounds made by the dying, the howls of animals in heat, the babbling of the insane. It is, I think, a kind of glossolalia: ecstatic and pure and boundless.

  Imagine for an instant the genuine sounds made by the deaf, before they’re taught how to pop their lips specifically for Ps, or hummi
ng for Ms. Theirs is our sound, all of ours, before it’s contaminated by the world and by each other. That trumpet blast, the murmuring, the shrieking like cats, the gorgeous stillness—that’s our hearts, the atonal music of our holy selves. It has a rhythm that defies culture and class, defies time: What tones emerge from the throats of the deaf have nothing to do with grammar or any set of rules about propriety. In their most authentic, uninhibited form, they’re about desire and need: the most direct, the most religious kind of communication.

  As a child, I held on to that uninfected, primal language long after I had heard my mother say bottle or botella, after my father had pronounced moon and luna with his flawless lips. For me, these were simpler: uuuooo and ooo-eh.

  It’s not that I couldn’t grasp consonants—I understood the essence of their brashness, the way they worked like sturdy beams in construction—but I believed, firmly and instinctively, that they should be used sparingly, that it was more natural to ponder the possibilities of forming my mouth in an O than in a T, to explore diphthongs instead of flashing those dramatic double Rs Spanish loves so much.

  When I was a child, Mami was aaah-oooh, Papi was iiii-oh. My own name was quickly reduced from Alejandra—so imperious, so long!—to Alef, Aleh, Ale—the L a concession, a compromise worked out by my mother and me because my father was terrified by my resistance.

  It is precisely in how we handle language that my father and I connected and diverged. We were both in a wrestling match with the gods but the rules were different: His, on the page, was as defined and classic as Greco-Roman competition; mine, in the air, is as messy and organic as a playground scuffle.

  For his decoding, my father needed contemplation, the meticulousness afforded by time. He liked his subjects: poetry about nature and the human condition, philosophical tracts about history, literature. For him, the search for meaning was endless: After a job was officially finished, he collected and rearranged his notes by his own method, a compendium of reflections and ideas on each work and what it provoked. Sometimes, years later, he would return to these writings, adding new explanations, new questions that had occurred to him.