Days of Awe

by Achy Obejas

  “Don’t touch anything,” my mother said, meaning the brujería around the ceiba. The tree’s gnarled roots—sometimes three, nearly four feet above the ground—twisted like tentacles through the small patch of dirt accorded to it on the promenade, ceremonially known as Cuban Memorial Way. “You don’t know what the spells are for. They could be for evil and you don’t want that kind of energy to rub off on you.”

  I stepped back and watched as she lay the bundle of blossoms— open-faced sunflowers, birds of paradise, and yellow daffodils—in a crook created by the bulging roots. She squatted for a moment on the packed, hard earth.

  “I don’t want to be here,” she said softly, choking as she stood up again, wiping her hands against her dress, “none of this belongs here.”

  XII

  When forced to admit to his Cuban origins, my father always described himself as a habanero, perhaps because of the urban quality that, in his mind, linked Havana back to Seville, the Spain of his imagination. He didn’t say that he was an oriental, only that he was born in Oriente, and only when pressed.

  He never recognized himself as having any special knowledge of the earth, of the way it yields to human needs, yet my mother’s gardens were hers because she worked them, not because she understood them. It was my father who would decipher the symptoms of any malady just by glancing at the flowers’ colors, or by the tenderness of the stems. He did this by barely looking, barely touching them, as if they might leave an awful residue on his manicured nails.

  It was, in fact, my father who advised my mother to cultivate Paul Neyron roses, hearty hybrid perennials that are remarkably resistant to both the heat and the cold. They’re nineteenth-century roses, elegant and still, roses I always assumed—without evidence, I admit—my father grew to love because of my great-grandfather Ytzak. I imagine them together in Oriente (the old man leaning on his cane to relieve the weight on his peg leg), smelling the delicate perfume, snipping them in bunches.

  In our garden in Chicago, up in Rogers Park where the houses are still hospitable single homes with large yards in front and back, my mother would scoop up the soil, water the thorny stalks, and prune the blooms, ultimately enjoying the huge white, pink, and red blossoms that opened to six inches. She would spend hours out there, massaging the ground around her flowers, examining the size of the buds. To the sides she’d plant sunflowers, like gatekeepers, golden and tall. Often, she’d share gardening secrets with Mrs. Choy next door, an ethnic Chinese exile from Vietnam who grew sweet potatoes and sugarcane in utter defiance of Chicago’s climate.

  Yet the minute that there was a scourge of insects, or an early browning of leaves, it was my father—his reading glasses on the tip of his nose—who my mother would trudge out to the garden to look at the problem, beads of perspiration immediately forming on his forehead. She’d hang by his side, waiting. He’d scratch his white beard, touch the plants and grunt not unlike Olinsky, muttering advice on herbal solutions, irrigation, and new ways to enhance the light.

  My mother would nod, always nod, as if she were taking mental notes from a great philosopher. (Quite often Mrs. Choy would join her, the two of them in awe of my father’s intuitive connections with the flora.) Then my father would hurry back in the house, away from the sun and the heat and the tiny bugs that crawled into his shoes or flew around the blossoms, and throw himself back into one of his Cuban-style rocking chairs, the reading light on, the poetry waiting.

  My father said he liked the large houses in Rogers Park, the fact that it had its own commercial area like a downtown, that it was on the lake. My father wouldn’t be caught dead in swimwear (I’ve looked and looked but I don’t think there’s a single photo of my father bare-chested), but he liked walking on the shore, especially in the cool morning hours in autumn. He loved the way the water froze in winter, how the waves curled like lacy fingers.

  My mother cherished the vast sandy beaches, too, but it was different: What she appreciated most was precisely the near-tropical heat, the commotion during the summers. No matter how hot it got, my mother could be counted on to turn up the temperature a few more degrees with her bubbling pots of black beans, her own hand-shredded vaca frita, and the sticky sweet caramel she’d derive from melting sugar for flan.

  As she traveled from her fragrant gardens of fresh roses and sturdy sunflowers to her kitchen filled with the aroma of garlic and cumin, she’d dance and dance to whatever suited her: Beny Moré, Celia Cruz, Olga Guillot, and Fernando Albuerne. She adored Roberto Ledesma’s versions of Armando Manzanero’s songs, and, after I came back from Cuba on my first trip, she learned to spin to Los Van Van as if she were thirty years younger. She would sometimes— especially when Celia was pumping—take a paper towel and sweep her body with it from head to toe while dancing, as in the cleansings in her own grandmother’s kitchen so long ago. (Sometimes our other neighbors, Polish émigrés named Chmelowiecz, would come over and ask her to please turn down the volume.)

  Each July and August—while my father worked on his translations in the quiet and air-conditioned comfort of his basement study in the afternoons or played dominoes with his Cuban friends, the slapping of the pieces on the table a percussive symphony—she’d walk down to the little secret beach just off Jarvis Avenue and stroll up the short pier. Then she’d sit and dangle her naked feet in the cool, cool water.

  Whenever I picture my mother there, staring off into the blue nothingness of Lake Michigan, I always try to imagine what she saw on the horizon: a collection of memories, neatly wrapped and stacked away, categorized like my father’s notes on translation.

  There is a word in Spanish, olvido, which is usually interpreted as oblivion or forgetfulness. But this is one term on which my father and I agree: Olvido is not just a void; but, much like memory itself, it is a place, with dimensions and weight. Rather than holding all we want to remember, it’s a repository for what we want to forget.

  Other Latin Americans, and some Americans who’ve had contact with Cubans, call us the Jews of the Caribbean.

  It is not a phrase much known in Cuba itself, but it has a familiar currency in exile. It’s meant as an epithet, playing off negative stereotypes about Jews. It alludes to the Cuban transmutation of Miami and Miami Beach (which, ironically, displaced a good number of Jews), from little meaningless metropolises to world-class cities.

  The allusion is not to hard work, however, but to greed and covetousness. Essentially anti-Semitic in nature, calling us the Jews of the Caribbean is supposed to deem us as untrustworthy partners in business, possessed of an ambition so unbridled that we will sell out to anyone, that we are concerned only with higher prices and acquisitions.

  When we are called the Jews of the Caribbean, it’s almost an accident that, like Jews, we are a people in diaspora and that, like Jews, we are a people concerned with questions and answers and the temperament of a god that could make us suffer, like Job, so inexplicably and capriciously.

  Growing up in Rogers Park, where a great many doors sprouted mezuzahs and the local Jewish community center kept up a steady stream of activities, I found other commonalities: Cubans and Jews both had families in which people had peculiar accents, both cooked funny foods, both were obsessed with a country in the Third World, both lived lives in the subjunctive, and both, quite frankly, thought they were the chosen people. In Rogers Park—in spite of the pockets of Asians, recently arrived Africans, and miscellaneous refugees from Central America and Eastern Europe—I was so surrounded by Jewish culture and life that I grew to believe Thanksgiving was the fall equivalent of Pesaj.

  When I was older, I discovered that Cubans have a Masada, too. Like the Jewish story—which is never mentioned in the Torah or Talmud—the Cuban legend is also outside the official history books. Just as the Jews of the Great Revolt found themselves surrounded by Roman soldiers and chose to commit suicide rather than surrender, the earliest inhabitants of Cuba woke up one day and realized they were being decimated by the Spanish conquistadores.
Unable to imagine continuing to live in such misery, the Indians decided to kill themselves by eating dirt, poisoning their bodies with the very ashes and bones of their ancestors.

  Among Jews, Masada is a shrine to Jewish honor and perseverance that is studied and revered. Among Cubans, the story of the Indians is a rumor, the Indians themselves erased from the earth.

  In Miami, in New York, and in every Cuban enclave I’ve ever encountered outside of the island, Cubans have a singular approach to being called the Jews of the Caribbean: We wear it like a badge of honor.

  For years, I heard that in palo monte, an Afro-Cuban spirituality more aggressive than santería, the most powerful talisman, or altar piece, is called the prenda judía. It’s said it requires the skull of a Jew.

  In Guanabacoa, a hamlet just east of Havana known for its magic and where my great-grandfather Ytzak is buried, there’s a little cemetery founded by American Jews in the early years of the twentieth century. Up on an airy hill overlooking a vast green countryside, the cemetery sits on the corner of Independencia del Este (East Independence, or independence from the east, depending on your reading) and Avenida Mártires (Martyrs Avenue), but the street sign is upside down and has been that way ever since anyone can remember.

  In a corner of the cemetery is a monument, a tomb, under which are buried bars of soap made from human fat that were recovered from Nazi concentration camps. The memorial is generally neglected but undisturbed. The rest of the cemetery is in ruins, its marble tombstones crumbling, the crypts pried open. Many of the graves lie empty, supplying the shrines of the local paleros.

  My parents have always said we chose Rogers Park because Mike Kauf, the body-building dentist married to Gladys, my mother’s cousin, had been raised there and was able to let us stay for a while at his family’s house, which was vacant when we arrived in the United States.

  But I have always wondered whether, at least in his heart, my father—the secret Jew—wasn’t happy that he could surround me effortlessly with the things I know he cared about so deeply. Not, of course, that my father ever said anything. Not that he ever participated, except in the most private and most mysterious of ways.

  I remember the first time I realized how different my father was. It was a Midwestern day, like any other in summer: sunny, warm, humid. Lake Michigan was a slate of innocent indigo just blocks away from our modest little home, all brick and perfect rosebushes, stairs up to my hideaway of books and playthings, stairs down to my father’s refuge, with his curious, smoky smells, the humming of his electronic typewriter, and his own gentle murmuring.

  It was a day in which we were a swarm of wasps, my friends and I, eleven years old, tearing around the pool table in our basement, the only cool place in the house, pricking each other with cue sticks across the pond of green felt. A bite here and there, red marks that lit up our skin, then faded with a hiccup, a giggle, a fantastic scream of delight.

  We didn’t notice my father coming down the stairs. It’s hard to believe that a man that magnificent in size and build could pass so invisibly between and around a throng of children high on their own blood sugar, squealing at every quick move, poking dangerously at each other as if spearing for sharks. But he went by us as stealthily as a rain cloud.

  When we finally saw him, he was all darkness, a majestic shadow on the door to what was always called his office but was really some kind of black hole where he would frequently seal himself, immune to us. His lesson plans, letters to friends and colleagues, translations of poems, and stacks of student papers always carefully laid next to the typewriter, each set of pages overlapping the other. My father was always so tidy.

  We didn’t pay attention, really, just continued with our merriment, our childish violence. Then Papi asked us, in his usual polite manner, to please leave, to go outside. “Por favor,” he said, nodding toward a stream of light that spilled into the drab, cool basement through the slit of a window from the sunny outdoors, a place where, no matter how idyllic, he’d never been comfortable. This was not a man, we could see in that instant, who had ever felt happy while throwing a ball, or who wiped sweat from his brow with a grin. He turned around in slow-motion, closing the door behind him.

  One of my friends, a recently arrived Latvian boy ginger-tinted from the millions of freckles all over his face and arms, lifted his cue stick like a hunter’s rifle and pretended to aim at where my father had stood.

  “Hey,” I said, reaching across the pool table with my own stick, inadvertently shattering the lightbulb in the lamp above it—a crackle and sputter and a tiny lightning storm.

  My mother was at the top of the stairs in a flash, just her feet and calves visible, voice booming. My father appeared only to hold the lamp in his delicate hands, quickly glancing at his watch as he inspected the damage. On the pool table, scalloped pieces of glass rested like discarded eggshells.

  My mother threw us out of the house, literally grabbed us under our armpits and tossed us out as if we were wild young dogs. She flung us onto the back lawn, where we bounced on the grass all green and rubbery. We panted, yelped, and jumped. We pushed our tongues out at one another, grabbed each other’s clothes so they’d stretch into wild triangles and rhomboids, then crumble into strangely wrinkled buds. We rolled on the dirt, all the while feeling the sun sizzling our skin, retelling the story of the exploding lightbulb, how it had detonated like a grenade.

  “Hey . . .”

  I turned around, a curtain of hair in my eyes. I used my earth-smudged fingers to part it.

  “Come here . . .” It was the ginger-colored Latvian kid, whispering excitedly from his new vantage point at a window looking into our basement. He waved us over with his hand, eyes fixed, mouth agape.

  I scrambled to where he was, moving so fast all I could see were my own blurred tennis shoes. I was a lanky girl, all limbs, all pickup sticks, just like my father had been as an adolescent. When I reached the boy, our heads bumped, something smelled of vomit, and I felt myself getting nauseous. One of the Choys’ daughter pushed in under me, her head bumping my chin.

  “Look, look at Mr. San José,” said the ginger boy, his finger pointing inside.

  I struggled to get a view. The sun’s glare sliced the windowpane in half and all I could see was my father’s lower body, swaying back and forth like a metronome. I inched up, pushed with my hands through the tangle of adolescent arms and loose sod around the window, finally pressing up against the glass.

  “Ah, Ale, I can’t see . . .” somebody said behind me.

  But I could see: There he was, my father, with eyes hooded, a mess of black straps around his left arm, holding something onto his head, his huge hands around a frayed book with pages that stuck out at odd angles. He was draped in a white shawl, whispering airy, alien words, his body rocking more ardently now, rolling with a powerful light that made his ears, his eyelashes, his lips, the tips of his fingers, all glow. There was so much flickering on the windowpane, it was blinding.

  “Ale!” insisted the voice behind me.

  The ground crumbled under me, somebody lifted my legs by the ankles to the sky, and my elbows and hands went waving, slapping against the window as the ginger boy tried to pull me away and the mountain of kids fell on my head.

  My eyes were closed when I heard the sound—my eyes were closed because my head was buried between children’s bodies and pointy weeds and I was afraid I’d be blinded if I opened them too soon. The sound came from my father’s throat: It was anguished and angry, low and guttural like a far-off train in a tunnel. But in seconds it was like the train itself roaring with all its flashing might above my head, as if I were trapped between its belly and the tracks, and all the bells were ringing. At its apogee, I heard glass shatter.

  When it was all over, when I felt air again on the back of my neck, I moved my head up slightly, then my bruised chin, and slowly opened my eyes. There, past the frame of the splintered basement window, was my father, his face wet from tears, glass shavings twinkl
ing on his bloody hand.

  XIII

  I had just returned from that first visit to Cuba when I met Karen Kilberg, a smart, neatly dressed young lawyer who impressed me foremost with her size: She was over six feet tall, a giant who moved with the ease and power of a leopard. She even had its coloring, with golden hair, wide dark eyes, and thin dark lips; her business suit was spotted with a surprisingly tasteful jungle motif.

  I was with Seth then, a lanky tousled-haired secular Jew studying photography at the School of the Art Institute. Younger, sweeter than me by far, he was an exquisite lover, pliable, poetically moody, and silky to the touch. I wasn’t in love with him but I thought that I could be. My parents treated him with warmth, though it was also clear that they perceived him as, if not a phase, a kind of temporary respite. He had none of the volatility of my earlier lovers, none of the danger I was usually attracted to. (By contrast, it was clear his family, while obviously fond of me, considered his time with me a kind of exotic adventure.)

  I was clearly committed to Seth when I met Karen, but I still thought of all that was unthinkable the minute I walked into her office and introduced myself as the last-minute Spanish-language interpreter for her afternoon court hearing. She barely looked up, tossing a file at me and immediately dialing up the agency that had sent me and calmly informing them that, since she’d wasted her time the week before giving background on the case to someone who had failed to show up on the critical court date, she had no intention whatsoever of paying. I put the file down fast but she reached over and, while still arguing with my boss on the phone, squeezed my arm as if to tell me not to worry.

  I can’t say it helped. I was a wreck going into court, watching her surveying the scene from the plaintiff’s table, coldly eyeing the defense—a short, pale hospital administrator and his egg-shaped lawyer, both wearing kippot and eating dried apricots from a plastic bag.