Days of Awe

by Achy Obejas

  In the end, the harvest produced only two things.

  The first was the surreal postponing of Christmas Eve from December 1969 to July of the following year because Fidel deemed that every able-bodied Cuban needed to be in the fields cutting cane during the traditional holidays. (This switching of holidays for convenience’s sake is apparently an old Cuban tradition: Though Havana was founded July 25, 1515, the celebrations take place on November 16 because there were other festivities already scheduled on the Catholic calendar for the real dates.)

  The harvest’s other legacy was bitterness.

  “Want to hear the latest?” Orlando says to me as we listen to the waters gurgling below the Malecón. “You see, he”—but he doesn’t comb at his chin this time, just looks around—“you know—el innombrable—had a brilliant idea, so he called in a group of scientists and told them, ‘We can solve many problems—problems of milk production, problems of nutrition, even help teach people responsibility if we can make my idea a reality.’ Well, the scientists all looked at each other—they’re used to his ideas—and they say, ‘Okay, what?’ And he says, ‘Let’s breed a miniature cow. Just think, every family will have its own milk so we can use the state’s production for export, the people will be better nourished, and the family can make a ritual out of taking care of its own vaquita.’ Then one of the scientists—he’s a wiseguy—he leans over to his colleague and says, ‘Look at that, El Comandante has invented the goat!’ ”

  When I tell Moisés Menach what I’ve heard about los caprichos (and even the mini-cow story), he shrugs. “They’re crazy ideas, sure,” he says, his milky eye drifting like freshly poured cream in coffee. “That’s the benefit of hindsight. I don’t deny, though, that some of those ideas sounded crazy even at the time. But why not? People thought Leonardo’s flying machines were crazy. Who knows who will be inspired by his ideas, the way the Wright Brothers were by Leonardo’s . . . who knows?”

  My father met Fidel only once. It was 1939 and Enrique was nineteen, by then a darkly somber young man, home from Havana for his grandmother’s funeral. Leah, my great-grandmother, had drowned in the waters of the Mayarí.

  When Enrique and a deeply distressed Ytzak (with whom my father was then living in Havana) arrived in Oriente to bury my grandmother, they first heard Fidel’s name from my grandfather Luis, who had recently begun to work cutting cane on a modest estate called Manacas near the town of Birán.

  “Some people swear he is the kindest man in all of Oriente,” Luis said of the old Spaniard who was his new boss. “Others say he’s a thief and a murderer. But the craziest thing is that the person who seems most angry with him—he has even come out to the fields and tried to organize us workers against him—is his son, Fidel. And he’s only thirteen!”

  His story was cut short when a weeping Sima emerged from the room where her mother lay. A black-robed priest from Santiago de Cuba followed her, trailing incense and blessings in Latin. Ytzak, red-faced and enraged, rended his fine linen guayabera right there, with one quick tear that seemed to blacken like flesh on fire. Sima went into hysterics, convinced nothing but evil would come to them now, sure that a report about Ytzak’s brashness would go out to secret inquisitors who’d make their way to the hilly woods of Oriente and force them to repent.

  Later, when Ytzak tried to recite the kaddish—at the top of his lungs, in full Jewish regalia—outside Leah’s locked door, Luis and Enrique had to drag him away. Because Ytzak refused to contain himself—“We are yeudim, we are yeudim!” he kept shouting between Hebrew prayers—the locals had begun to talk, eventually refusing to help with the internment for fear of the devil himself. (It was Enrique and Moisés who dug Leah’s grave, their young shoulders bending sadly into the task.) At the house, Ytzak covered all the mirrors with black and set a full meal out for the poor: beef stew and rice, bread and fruit, all of which went untouched by the campesinos, who wondered if the crazy old man was trying to poison somebody.

  With all the gossip and tension in the air, Luis was forced to tell Haim, Moisés’s father—the only person he thought he could possibly trust with this secret—the entire family story and enlist him in keeping Ytzak from the funeral until the priest was done and the simple pine box was sprinkled with dirt. But Haim, a lax Jew but a Jew who was nonetheless proud and open about his heritage, agreed to help only if Luis would let Ytzak say the kaddish at the grave later, alone, after everyone was gone. When Luis acceded, Haim, who was as big as a tower, sat Ytzak down and explained to him what was happening. To everyone’s surprise, Ytzak stayed put, quietly weeping into his prayer book.

  Out on the porch, Enrique pleaded with his father. “Let him go, the harm has already been done,” he said, sweeping his arm to indicate the snooping neighbors. “It would have been bad enough if they’d thought we were Jews, but now they think we’re satanists, for god’s sake.”

  “No, no, no,” Luis insisted.

  “But Papá—”

  A frustrated, angry Luis refused, his rough hands shaking.

  “But—”

  Without warning, Luis slapped his son hard across the face. “Do not defy me,” he said. The veins on his head throbbed. “I am doing this for your mother, the only person who really cared about your grandmother. As it is, we already waited much too long to bury Leah so you could be here. You and Ytzak, you two wonderful Jews out in the world, are the cruelest, most selfish people on earth.”

  “Come on,” a stunned Moisés Menach, who’d witnessed it all, said to my father, who stood there like a statue, numb from shock, holding his stinging cheek in his hand.

  He quickly took Enrique by the elbow and led him away from the stuffy family home. In the distance they could see the billowy stacks from the sugar mills. The air smelled of molasses. Moisés steered my distraught father into the tangled green of the countryside, into the thicket of cedars and flamboyants and wild hibiscus. In the blink of an eye, they found themselves by the river’s edge, its currents laced with white as the foam rushed past the shores. Their shirts were pressed with sweat to their backs, their faces runny with red dust.

  As they neared the gushing waters, my father stubbed his foot on a rock and grunted. But when he bent to nurse his hurt extremity, it was as if something inside him had broken instead. “I’m so sick of it,” Enrique said, sobbing. “Being Jewish is a fucking curse. Everybody hates us! My god, look at what’s happening in Europe— no one cares, no one even believes it!”

  He sat down on the ground as Moisés put his arm around him, holding him silently. “My grandfather insists and insists, and in the meantime, everyone he loves turns against him,” Enrique said. “In order to circumcise me the right way, to have his damned Jewish legacy, he lost his whole fucking Jewish history.” He waved at the Mayarí, its waters curling on the shore, and Moisés remembered the story about Luis and the two family Bibles he’d thrown in the river.

  After a moment, my father, still sniffling, reached down and unlaced the shoes bought wholesale on Muralla Street in Havana, stripped his drenched shirt and loose pants from his sturdy frame, and tiptoed to the very rim of the water, awkwardly making his way through gravel and rocks, weeds and discarded bits of rusted metal and glass.

  Moisés stayed behind. As he watched my father’s pallid body while he cautiously tested the river’s temperature with his swollen left foot, he heard the unmistakable boo of a small owl, then a rustling of wings and the high-pitched scream of a warm-blooded creature caught by surprise in its fatal claws.

  It was because Moisés had turned to the owl and its prey that he missed the exact moment when Fidel entered the picture. But there he was, a strapping adolescent, still covered with a layer of baby fat but clearly muscular underneath, standing wet and naked in front of my father. He was knee deep in the river and staring unabashedly at Enrique’s penis.

  “What happened to you?” the boy asked, unsure what to make of what he was seeing.

  “What do you mean?” Enrique responded, blushing
so much that Moisés, hurriedly approaching from behind him, could see the red in his ears.

  “Your thing, it’s been cut or something,” said the young Fidel, who quickly glanced down at his own to make sure it was still intact.

  “I’m . . . I’m a . . . Jew,” said Enrique, the only time in his life he would ever volunteer that. Then he quickly hobbled back to his clothes and dressed, refusing to make eye contact with anyone.

  “A Jew? Is he rich?” a grinning Fidel asked Moisés, who was now standing equidistant between the two, shocked but happy at my father’s admission.

  “No,” Moisés said, annoyed and confused, remembering suddenly that this boy was the troublesome heir to the Manacas farm. “Are you?”

  “Me? Heck no,” said Fidel, smiling broadly. “I’m just lucky. You don’t need money if you’re lucky.”

  Then he laughed and threw himself back into the Mayarí, where his powerful arms and legs instantly propelled him out of sight.

  XVI

  After my father’s circumcision, Ytzak and baby Enrique returned to Oriente and the puny plot of land where Luis and Sima lived. Banned by the angry parents for nearly an entire year from seeing his grandson, a dejected Ytzak went back to the small but tasteful house he’d once shared with Leah, the wife he’d left behind when he went off in search of a Jewish life. No one could have known then that her death years later would be so enigmatic, so emotional.

  For her part, Leah, a gloomy woman whom Ytzak had once seen as both a challenge and beautiful, neither resisted nor encouraged his return. Whether they ever shared matrimonial intimacy again is anyone’s guess, but what’s certain is that they signed a new covenant, one in which their lives intersected but did not necessarily connect.

  Lacking a church to attend out in the wilderness, she went to a prayer circle for her communal Catholic performances, leaving Ytzak alone to his solitary Jewish meditations. No menorah was ever lit in their house again, publicly or privately, no candle lit at all unless it was to the Virgin of Charity. Ytzak brooded and anxiously limped about on his peg leg but said nothing, not even when Leah brought a half dozen criolla women to the house to recite the Roman rosary on Mondays while he fasted. (Afterward, the women would retreat to their homes, where, for insurance, they’d blow cigar smoke, drink rum, and light candles for Elegguá.)

  What the two of them shared was a kind of awkwardness and embarrassment. Water was boiled until half of it steamed away, laundry was pressed stiff with starch, and vegetables were rubbed raw in the kitchen. All the while, Leah’s practical speech was accented with a flourish of may I’s, thank you’s, and por favor’s that were both unnatural and vaguely threatening.

  Ytzak, who couldn’t bear to return to the grinder or any other job at the sugar mill, made a living for a while fashioning shoes for the nearby campesinos and writing letters for those who were illiterate. If he signed his own name, he’d follow it with samech tet, or True Sephardim, which nobody but other Jews—and not even most of them—ever understood.

  In the years after “the dance of the millions”—the late twenties and early thirties—when world sugar prices dropped, chaos came to Cuba, particularly Oriente, where the mills were virtually the only industry. During that time Ytzak often served as an interpreter— he’d learned a bit of English from the Corwens—for the U.S. businessmen his Havana friends would send his way. These were invariably speculators, investors in sugar, cattle, or lumber, men who saw Cuba as the wild west, a new frontier to be conquered and attached to the mainland, one way or another.

  “Statehood for Cuba’s not important to me, not at all,” a wily Virginian confided once after several glasses of rum while languishing in a rocking chair on Ytzak and Leah’s porch. “You know why? ’Cause Cubans are going to become Americans anyway. Heck, man, you’re crazy to buy everything we bring down here. Let me tell you, trade will make you an American faster than statehood, taxes, or that Platt Amendment.”

  The Moor, Ytzak’s old friend from Havana, was still working as a traveling salesman now and then—he was successful enough that he had set up his own store on Muralla Street in Old Havana but had been stung, like everyone else, by the Great Depression. Though he was an undistilled capitalist in his own business dealings, in the intervening years he’d become friends in Havana with radical Jewish refugees from Palestine and Poland. They had brought with them pamphlets and books on Zionism, Marxism, and the Russian revolution that he found compelling.

  Sometimes, late at night, The Moor and Ytzak would discuss these ideas behind screens of cigar smoke while rocking on the porch. Oriente, cradleland of all of Cuba’s uprisings, was in anarchy then. With alarming frequency, the campesinos would set fire to the sugarcane fields. When hunger got especially sharp and distorted their reasoning, they’d turn on each other, their machetes sharp and murderous.

  The Moor said Havana was no better; in fact, just a few years after the dictator Gerardo Machado came to power, the city was choking with panhandlers and thieves, workers’ strikes paralyzed commerce, and there were frequent and armed insurrections. The Moor was sure anybody in his right mind could look out at the port of Havana and see the Americans sitting there in their impenetrable steel ships, directing the madness, ready to invade.

  But Ytzak resisted The Moor’s vision; it was the only way he could stand the misery around him in Oriente, the violence and the suffering of his neighbors, who appeared to him thinner and ghostlier by the day. Indeed, as time went by, the city took on a rosier and rosier tint in his mind: The Americans in Havana had always treated him well. There was a community of Jews, he had helped found the first Sephardic synagogue in Cuba. He remembered the way the fog lifted in the morning, the bright yellow globes of the gaslights extinguished one by one by lively boys with long poles that reached up to cap them. The city was wonderfully noisy, full of gaiety and beautiful women. He was sure it was comparable to Rome, Alexandria, or Hollywood.

  On subsequent trips to Ytzak’s house, The Moor brought him articles and books by Fernando Ortiz and Jorge Mañach that argued for a sense of cubanismo, and which Ytzak, of course, ardently supported. “Why do you think I went to war?” he’d ask. “Why do you think I gladly sacrificed my leg?”

  Later, The Moor delivered issues of Cuba Contemporánea and other magazines critical of Cuba’s growing dependency on sugar and the U.S. market. They were dog-eared and worn, but still capable of causing tense talks on Ytzak and Leah’s porch. The only way out of the morass, declared The Moor, was to free Cuba of all foreign influence, especially that of the United States. The only way, retorted Ytzak, was for Cubans to act more like Americans, who struck him as civilized and smart. All the while, Enrique and Moisés would roll around between the rocking chairs and the tired extremities of the passionate men, indifferent to it all.

  When The Moor came to Oriente, he’d also leave goods at Ytzak’s for the campesinos to pick up. One time, a visiting American inquired about the vast collection of obviously new kitchen pots stored on the back porch, and when Ytzak explained that they belonged to some of The Moor’s clients, the American offered to bring him carving knives, cheap, on his next trip from the United States.

  That’s how, slowly, without his even noticing it, Ytzak’s house developed into a little trading post, and eventually into a dry-goods store. In its heyday, it carried everything from soap to oil lamps, underwear to pine nuts, and even reading glasses. Ytzak kept the political pamphlets and books The Moor brought him in his room, in a box under the bed he reluctantly shared with Leah.

  For Ytzak, those years were all a waiting game.

  The focus of his patience was Enrique, who ran naked around Luis and Sima’s garden and played with Moisés, the roly-poly charcoal-colored son of the only openly Jewish family they knew. Ytzak had been heartened by the fact that Enrique had been naturally drawn to Moisés, although the Menachs’ religious practices, while out in the open, seemed to him as disinterested as Sima and Luis’s. No one seemed to know or care much
about praying or the Sabbath, much less anything more complicated, like tefillin. Moreover, the Menachs struck Ytzak as occasionally pretentious. Since Haim had studied in French schools in Turkey, they seasoned their already fractured judeo-español with the language of Napoleon and added cream to all their sauces, constantly mixing meat and milk. (Not that Ytzak understood or kept kosher very well—in Oriente it was virtually impossible—but he always hoped to find in other Jews examples for all the ways he aspired to be.)

  After Enrique’s brit milah, Luis and Sima’s observances had dropped to a bare minimum, offering prayers, just like the Menachs, only on the High Holidays. Like their ancestors before them, they kept young Enrique away from their rituals. They understood that he might recognize elements from the Menachs’ worship, or perhaps overhear something from the Lithuanian and Russian Jews who were streaming into Oriente to work on the railroad, but both Luis and Sima insisted on waiting until he was older before burdening him with the meaning of his Jewishness.

  If Enrique ever questioned anything that seemed to separate his family from the natives around him, Luis and Sima assured him with what would eventually become his own refrain: “We are Spanish, descended from nobility, that is all,” they’d say in their own unconvincing open-mouthed Cuban way. Not even they believed it.

  Ytzak would roll his eyes and mutter under his breath: “We are Cubans—that is why we had a war of independence from Spain— and we are Jews.” He refused to link up to the mother country, refused to claim any blood but that of Abraham and what he’d spilled on the island.

  Most of the time, Ytzak simply observed Enrique from afar. Sometimes Leah would spend time with the two of them, undoubtedly out of grandmotherly love but also to supervise the untrustworthy grandfather. After the circumcision episode, the entire family was on the lookout for Ytzak. Luis and Sima had made him promise not to say anything without their permission, threatening to ban him forever if he went back on his word.