Days of Awe

by Achy Obejas

  Although my father worked with many living Latin American writers (except Gabriel García Márquez who, as one of Fidel’s best friends, sent my father admiring notes but knew, as my father also knew, that hiring him, an exile, would be both controversial and unseemly), translation for him had little to do with the rough and tumble, the magic of the New World.

  For my father, translation was a spiritual return to Spain— although he never went there in real life, never booked a tour, demurred every time he received an invitation to lecture or receive an award. It was his way of creating and preserving Spain, of explaining his otherness in the United States without the blatant trauma of racism. That travel ban was not extended anywhere else but to Cuba, so that he became a regular at Mexican and Argentinean universities instead, the gracious visiting scholar whose painstaking manners impressed everyone as old-fashioned and very Spanish.

  Each night, after his paid work was completed, my father would pull out the writings of Pedro Salinas or Ramón José Sender, Elena Quiroga, Abraham de Toledo, or any other ancient Spaniard. Some of what he labored over was archaic, different kinds of Ladino and judeo-español in fact, but he would never admit it, or his fascination. His favorite was the Sephardic poet Judah Halevi, possibly the most eloquent voice ever on the subject of exile (in both Ladino and Hebrew).

  As I watched him scribbling (always by hand) late at night, he struck me as a direct descendant of Maimonides, writing his own guide to the perplexed, trying to rationalize godly acts, as if there were mortal ways to reason with things that are both sacred and mundane, like language itself. He would spend hours staring at his own responsa, the letters losing meaning and becoming light.

  I told him once that the rabbis quoted in the discussions in the Talmud are known as amora’im, Aramaic for translators, making his entire career an inadvertent but quintessentially Jewish act. I told him this as a dare, as bait, expecting him to at least wince.

  Instead, he paused, then looked up at me quizzically. “What does that say about you?” he asked.

  My father was unimpressed by my work. He saw it not as a part of what he did, but as something else entirely.

  He was irritated by the inevitability of the lost word or phrase in oral interpretation, by the fact that in a minute or two he could have found a better, more exact expression. Without a dictionary, he didn’t know what to do with his immaculate hands, and he despised paraphrases and approximations. “You’re just running division,” he would say, betraying the translator’s oldest prejudice. Moreover, he was always flustered by the complicated ordinariness of most interpreting work, by the frequent drama of its concerns.

  But me, I’m an empath. I slip my client’s words through my mouth as if they were formed by the electrical impulses of my own brain. I don’t think, I hook in, I mind-meld, I feel, and I articulate all the agony or joy or confusion the client is experiencing, no matter how horrible or banal the proceedings. When I’m in my reverie, I have no clue about what I’m actually saying. It’s all aaaah-uh-eeeeeeeeeeeeee.

  It’s not that I don’t appreciate exactitude. Indeed, my professional reputation is based on my precision, on my talent for harnessing it all, no matter how frantic the situation—say, a hospital emergency room—or the intricacies of the dialogue—consider, for example, the conversation between a Guatemalan immigrant, a Mayan whose own Spanish is spiced with Quiché and a doctor using English-language medical terms to explain why the immigrant’s only son will be a vegetable for the rest of his life because of the random bullet lodged in his brain.

  My father may have tortured himself looking for a Spanish heaven, but I simply pluck the best word, whether cielo or paraíso or porvenir and give it motion and meaning with my utterance. I talk and talk, negotiating between intention and message, and when we arrive at agreement, my voice falls silent, as fleeting as the spirit of the boy in the coma as it disappears into the sky.

  My father may have been of the ages, but I relish the moment. It is one of the few ways in which I am inescapably Cuban.

  According to the Bible, the universal language I’ve dreamt about existed once, in what was the nascent city of Babylon. Its people were the descendants of Noah, prosperous but much too ambitious. They thought they could build a stairway, a tower to heaven. The Bible doesn’t mention any dissension, not a single voice that questioned the wisdom of such a crazy notion. And so the Babylonians set about their impossible labor.

  God, of course, was unimpressed. The punishment inflicted on the early Babylonians for their presumption was not merely to level the Tower of Babel but to create babble itself: Language was fractured into a confusion of tongues, chaos ripe for misunderstanding, hatred, and revolution.

  Years later, when the Jews were expelled from Zion by the Babylonian king, he took the best and the brightest of the Israelites back to his kingdom. The Jews lamented this forced separation from their land, family, and friends.

  Yet, nostalgia aside, the Jews flourished in exile: married, built homes, had children, became known for their splendid handicraft and established themselves as merchants. In short, they built a community along the Babylonian shores.

  Seventy years or so after the Jewish exile began, Babylon was conquered by King Cyrus of Persia, who offered the Jews an opportunity to return to their own land. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the Jews decided to remain in Babylon, tending to their families and businesses, continuing to lead the only life they really knew, sending monies and goods back to those who had stayed behind in now mythical Israel.

  XI

  Havana and Miami are nothing alike.

  In Havana, the blue of the sea winks between colonial columns and Jetsons-style 1950s high-rises. Rain falls in spurts, then clears to not uncommon double rainbows shimmering just off the horizon. Fried pork flanks sizzle in fat just inside open windows, sewers spill with regularity, and battalions of roses and the purple-red flowers of banana trees awe the senses. Along the Malecón stretches a necklace of twinkling black coral—an aphrodisiac said to strengthen the heart, cure gout and epilepsy.

  Havana has an insolent majesty—the way the centuries unfold in the ornate architecture, the gently scalloped stone facade of the García Lorca theater, or the inadvertent postmodernism of the capitol building, a miniature of the one based in Washington, D.C., a reduction perhaps meant to reflect expectations about the island’s democratic possibilities. (Built in 1929 at a cost of $20 million, more than half the budget was later discovered to be payola, a fact that doesn’t ever come up in conversation because Cubans, for whatever reason, choose instead to insist that their dome—in fact, their capitol—is bigger than the original, the evidence of their eyes be damned.) These days, Havana may be the very portrait of a post-nuclear holocaust, but the city is, as always, a rock.

  Miami, by contrast, is acrid and flat, floating on the uneasy foundation of the Everglades. Miami may boast of its shiny steel towers along Brickell Avenue (never mentioning that they’re monuments to Colombian drug cartels and the 1980s art of money laundering) , but their height is restricted by both law and nature: Those skyscrapers are built on a bog. Whatever their reach, they will sink like a stone into the muddy swamps if they should ever exceed their grasp.

  When we arrived in Miami in 1961, it was a ghost town, the holding place for the black—mostly West Indian—and Latino domestics, gardeners, and chauffeurs who traveled across the Venetian and McArthur causeways every day to tend to the needs of the rich and touristic in glittery Miami Beach. Miami’s downtown then had an even, horizontal quality, the parched feel of the desert on its too-hot-to-touch pavement.

  When my parents—papers in hand certifying their new status as Cuban exiles—stepped out of the magnificent pink tower known then as Freedom Center and onto sovereign but empty Biscayne Boulevard, they were amazed. Not by Miami’s abundance, the orderliness of its traffic, or its cloudless sky. What shocked them was the quiet. If you rolled a stone along any residential street in Miami, you could hear it
sputtering along, then winding down like everything else, exhausted and finally still.

  For the first few hours after our release, my parents walked around the heart of Miami, up Flagler, down S.W. 2nd Street, up to N.E. 1st Avenue, in and around stores that sold sundries, nurse and janitor uniforms, and lots of luggage. Even at the shop counters, where the normal bustle of commerce should have echoed, all sound was muffled by the constant whirl of fans and the occasional hum of air-conditioning. The store owners were white-haired and cranky, like Olinsky, who was already on his way to his sister’s house in Detroit.

  I rode my father’s tired shoulders as we strolled in and out of shops selling beltless slacks, plastic-wrapped women’s dresses, and those ubiquitous suitcases. There were whole sets of three and five pieces that fit compactly one into the other for storage, huge mortal-sized cargo boxes that would require moving men to transport them if they were ever filled.

  Perhaps it was the pervasiveness of so much travel gear that suggested Miami as a way station, not a destination. What is certain is that my parents needed only that short walk through the heart of the city to decide that anyplace else, even sight unseen, would be better.

  That first night, sitting in the splendorous Miami home of Irene Cohen, an American who had been José Carlos’s lover during his college days at the University of Pennsylvania, my mother called her cousin Gladys, who was then living in Chicago, and accepted her offer to live there, at least for a while, with her and her American husband, a prosperous dentist named Mike Kauf who competed in body-building contests on the side.

  To help my parents find out a little bit about where they were going, Irene lent them the C volume of her kids’ Encyclopaedia Britannica , in which they located Chicago on the map and read about Al Capone and Carl Sandburg, Enrico Fermi and the misfortunes (erroneously) blamed on Mrs. O’Leary’s cow. The encyclopedia did not say much about Jean Baptiste DuSable, the city’s African-American founder, and nothing at all about the race riots of 1919. It would be years before Chicago’s story would rightfully include the siren song of Mahalia Jackson, the nightmare of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, or the wild night in 1983 when a jubilant Harold Washington sang a raucous “My Kind of Town” to celebrate his election as the city’s first black mayor.

  But as my parents read about Chicago from the thick volume, they each found their reasons to like it.

  “There’s water,” my father thought to himself, and imagining Lake Shore Drive and how it might curve around the shore, he added: “And a Malecón.”

  “Sweet water,” my mother mused while conjuring an endless blue pool where Ochún might feel at home: “We’ll be safe there.”

  It would be a few days before passage to Chicago could be arranged. In the meantime, my parents tried to bring some order to their lives by establishing whatever they could of their routines. Borrowing Irene’s glasses, including some Waterfords, my mother improvised an altar in the utility room, right on top of the dryer. Because the machine hummed and vibrated when operational, my mother would remove her icon, glasses, and candles each time a load needed to be dried, setting everything but the Virgin on the cold tile floor for the time being. She’d carry la Virgencita around with her for the forty minutes it took the clothes to tumble dry, then put everything back in place as quickly as possible.

  Actually, my mother’s icon had arrived damaged on American shores. When she first opened the rumpled box in Irene’s guest bedroom and fished it out from the damp newspapers, its left hand was dangling as if by a sinew, and a layer of plaster, like a wedge of white deli meat, had been sliced from her face. Here and there, mysterious holes dotted her body, as if something or someone had attacked her with a poker. My mother crumbled at the sight, just folded like a used tissue next to the bed where the Virgin lay wounded, and cried and cried.

  But my father, who never believed in Christian or pagan votaries, gathered the figure in his hands and, shaking the box and the newspapers, salvaged as much of her bits and pieces as he could. With a bright lamp and a bottle of Elmer’s glue provided by Irene from her husband’s workshop out in the garage, my father stayed up the whole first night we were in the United States—this, after our travail at sea—and, with his magic hands, restored my mother’s precious saint with such love and craftsmanship that it is virtually impossible to see the scars, even to this day.

  During those few days in Miami, my father took walks every morning—exhausting sojourns in which the heat and humidity humiliated him with their power, never finding natural bodies of water but lots of sticky aloe everywhere. He’d come back home with his tongue hanging out like a dog, his chest wet from sweat, and a weariness that drove him right back to bed.

  There were already a number of Cuban cafes throughout the city then—dime-sized cafeterias that served cafecitos and bulky Cuban sandwiches of pork, ham, and cheese—blasting their radios and drawing crowds of cigar-smoking men to the sidewalks outside their counters. With the Bay of Pigs debacle unfolding, the announcers were perpetually excited, dramatic in their diction.

  “Bomb them, bomb them!” shouted one enraged old man listening in—his Bs were sprays of saliva, his Os like the missiles themselves dropping through the air—as another news report talked about casualties and the ever-increasing number of prisoners of war. The group around him at the cafeteria cheered.

  My father was horrified: Even if bombing was the only way, how could anyone be jubilant over this, especially in their own country? Cuba was so small, so intimate: Might they not bomb their own neighbors, kill their friends and relatives in the process?

  The cafeteria owner—a bear-shaped fellow with a large, porous nose—shook his head in dismay. “This isn’t going to get us anywhere,” he predicted. “Things will only get worse, you’ll see.”

  My father was relieved; a voice of reason had been lifted. But to his surprise, the men shouted him down. “Are you crazy?” said the angry old man. “You think the Americans are going to let Fidel beat them? When has that ever happened, eh, that the Americans lose? And to whom? To a ball of dirt in military fatigues? Are you out of your mind?”

  “Look, do you hear anything you believe on these news reports about an uprising? Have you heard from any of your relatives in Cuba about anybody doing anything?” the cafe owner retorted.

  The crowd drew back, aghast. “What are you, some sort of Communist? What radio station are you listening to? All the ones I hear talk about how the Cubans are in revolt!” said the old man. Disgusted, he poured out his cafecito and stepped back from the counter.

  “No, look, use your—” the cafe owner began.

  The old man cut him off, spreading his arms like a barricade. “This guy’s a Communist. I don’t support Communists.” He slapped away some coins a dumbfounded kid was holding out to pay for a can of soda. “Don’t give your money to a Communist!” The coins rattled on the sidewalk, rolled away like mercury. The kid and the cafe owner exchanged embarrassed looks. Then the cafe owner waved him away, as if to say it was okay.

  “It’s because of people like you that we’re in this mess!” the old man shouted while pointing at the cafe owner with a trembling index finger. By now, he had a Roman rabble behind him: “¡Ñángara! ¡Ñángara!”

  The disgusted cafe owner turned away, letting the crowd shout for a while until they tired of it and returned to gossiping and the radio news. Later, when no one was looking, my father slipped up to the counter and handed the owner some coins.

  “It’s for the boy, for whatever he bought,” Enrique said apologetically.

  The cafe owner stared at him. “Is this some sort of joke?” In his hand he held out my father’s money: three glistening Cuban coins.

  “I . . . I just arrived,” my father said, flustered, “it’s all I have.”

  “These are no good here, my friend, absolutely no good,” the cafe owner said. He slapped the coins back in my father’s hands, holding them together with his own rough palms.

  When
it was all said and done, the Bay of Pigs invasion was a disaster. The United States, which had devised the idea of the assault and recruited the exiles to man it, never provided air cover, essentially condemning the volunteers to death. There are many theories about why this happened, but what’s clear is that the CIA, in its arrogance, never really studied the Cuban situation well enough to realize an attack was probably impossible, at least then and there.

  The agency’s bungling gave Fidel his greatest victory and a lifetime of excuses: He became the first Latin American leader to repel an American military strike, a distinction that, in a century when U.S. troops had forced themselves on others dozens of times, created a legend. From then on, whenever things went badly in Cuba, Fidel pointed north: “The yanquis are coming!” And every Cuban would rise to the occasion, their honor at stake. In Havana, Moisés and Orlando would run to their posts.

  Years later, a memorial was built in Miami to honor the men of the Brigade 2506, many of whom were ransomed from Cuba by American authorities after Bay of Pigs, some of whom died in battles and others who were shot before the paredón.

  Many years after my first trip to Cuba, my mother and I found ourselves in the dewy mist of early light, staring at scattered pieces of coconut shell, a dead chicken with a red ribbon tied around its feet, and a small pile of pebbles carefully arranged under a gargantuan ceiba tree on S.W. 13th Avenue in Miami. Regarded as sacred by many Cubans who practice santería, the ceiba sits behind the memorial to the Cubans who lost their lives during the exile invasion. My mother and I had come to leave a small bouquet at the shrine in memory of José Carlos. But the monument itself was somewhat neglected—it sported graffiti and one of its posts was missing a top.