Days of Awe

by Achy Obejas

  But Ytzak needn’t have worried. As he grew older, Enrique began to drift toward him on his own, as if he instinctively recognized something that inevitably linked them together. He’d stroll from Luis and Sima’s little home deep in the woods over to Ytzak and Leah’s busy store and loiter about the place, reading, napping, just hanging around. Ytzak would sometimes give him and Moisés errands to run in exchange for candy.

  “Goral,” a proud Ytzak whispered to himself (he’d learned a little bit of secular Hebrew, and Yiddish, too, from his time in Havana) as he told stories to his grandson and Moisés. His heroes included José Martí and Antonio Maceo, Abraham Lincoln and the Indian Hatuey, who preferred to die at the stake than share a heaven with his Spanish oppressors.

  But Ytzak also snuck in Jewish stories, like the one about David and his mighty slingshot, how he was just a boy like them once, tending sheep out in the wilderness. Ytzak was particularly fond of the account of David and Jonathan, of the remarkable friendship that surpassed women and war. As a result, he looked on Moisés as a sacred gift, a sign that Enrique’s soul would not be lost to Israel.

  That Ytzak could see his grandson in any kind of intrepid role— undoubtedly, in Ytzak’s mind, my father was David, Moisés merely Jonathan, his loyal adjunct—was somewhat of a miracle of faith in itself.

  Although Enrique was an excellent student, he dropped out of the mill-run school after the fourth grade. An exasperated Luis tried to teach him a few jobs at the sugar mill—hauling cane, helping to run Ytzak’s old grinder, simply cleaning the machinery—but Enrique, whose exquisite hands would split and bleed with the slightest effort, was a disaster at everything.

  In truth, my father was masterful in the garden, but it was not a talent that could be cultivated. What Enrique did was touch things, just touch them, and they would grow spectacularly. He could spit on the ground, out of spite even, and in days huge white tubulars would sprout, thick tentacles pushing anxiously out of the dirt. He’d pat a hen on the head and she’d deliver egg after egg, each one with a perfect yolk and plenty of white for meringue.

  But Enrique had no interest in his special endowment. It baffled and frustrated him. Everything had to be coaxed, forced out of him, so that nothing in the end could be appreciated. People said he was spoiled, lazy, even cursed.

  Left to his own devices, Enrique would throw himself in his hammock or rock away on the porch at Ytzak and Leah’s and read and reread everything he had discovered in the box behind the mosquito netting and under his grandparents’ bed. My father found that he loved Martí—the poetry most of all, tolerating the essays just enough to contextualize the verses.

  When Enrique turned twelve, he tried to teach the kids who didn’t attend the mill school how to read, a task most everyone considered useless, since many of the campesinos saw literacy as an affectation. The lessons were always interrupted by the more urgent needs of families and cane. Eventually, one of his students, a pale skinny boy with wild hair named Celestino, began writing poems on tree trunks, but the campesinos taunted and beat him. Sometime later, a stunned Enrique found Celestino hanging lifeless from a branch.

  Traumatized and scared, Enrique stopped his lessons. He wound up working in Ytzak’s store, taking orders from across the counter his grandfather had installed, dully discussing spices for meat and Mexican lace with the women who made up the majority of the clientele. While at the store, he often thought about Celestino, imagined him with scribbled bark stuffed in his mouth.

  When he had to walk home at night, Enrique worried about every snapping twig, every flutter and tweet in the darkness. He envisioned killer shadows and his own legs dangling above the ground. He wondered if Ytzak felt the same way in Oriente, if that was why he’d developed his vision of Havana as a fairy-tale city—a city in which men were free—free to be themselves in every sense. In his heart, Enrique knew that this paradise could not possibly exist, that everyone he encountered who’d actually been to Havana reported constant mayhem. But in the thick black of the tangled woods, he’d close his eyes and visualize Ytzak’s paradise: The mighty ships on the shore, the noise of the vendors, the tang of sea salt. At the time, he’d never even seen the ocean, and he was dying to taste it.

  In the end, Ytzak’s visions proved to be a kind of training ground: Listening to his grandfather talk about Havana, Enrique learned how to construct a dream of perfection, how to conjure heaven so as to live on earth.

  XVII

  For Leah, watching Enrique grow up was a trial of patience, too, but for different reasons. While Ytzak watched him anticipating freedom, Leah couldn’t help but see an inevitable disgrace coming upon her. Twice Ytzak had left her, and she knew the third and final time would be with Enrique. She’d look at him and mutter, “Goral, goral.”

  Ytzak, who was known as Antonio then and hadn’t yet decided he wanted to use his Jewish name, first disappeared in the summer of 1897, shortly after they married. Leah had been a beautiful, black-haired fourteen-year-old bride, supposedly lucky to have snared a husband from Santiago instead of one of the cruder campesinos. But after reading treatises by José Martí (illegally smuggled into Cuba from Tampa and New York, where they were published), sixteen-year-old Antonio and all four of his older brothers left to fight for Cuba’s independence from Spain.

  For months, there would be no news from him except maybe a report from a friend saying that he was okay, a hero in General Máximo Gómez’s regiment; or that he was dead, buried with honors on a hill somewhere in Las Villas or in the fields of Pinar del Río. A few times she heard he’d been interned in Spanish concentration camps (a generation later, Adolf Hitler would tell a journalist he knew about the camps in Cuba, and thought they were a great idea).

  Four times young Leah thought she was widowed, only to learn later that the dead boy was not Antonio, but one of his brothers, each one a martyr for liberation. (With each death, she aged a little, so that by the time they were in their late twenties, she already had a few gray hairs and lines around her mouth, while Antonio, in spite of the horrors of war, remained sunny and youthful—their disparity was such that, years later, he’d often be confused for her ward.)

  A few times during the war, Antonio appeared to her in the night—always a stranger, his downy beard dirty, his muscles flaccid, dressed only in rags—and they’d fall on each other, making love, holding on for as long as possible. He’d conclude his visit with an extraordinary feast in which he would forget his manners and gnaw like a wild dog at whatever meat was left on a salty chicken leg. He’d fall asleep, greasy and exhausted, snoring like a beast.

  But as soon as Leah surrendered to the exhaustion of his whirlwind visit, she’d be startled by the sudden emptiness of his departure. She never saw the dawn with him, only the soft outline, the streaks of dirt left by his body on the sheets. Outside, the thick blanket of fog that covers Oriente each and every morning erased all trace of him.

  Then for a long time there’d be no word, no touch, nothing. Leah heard from the men who came by that the yanquis were coming, lustful for the island. She heard about the Maine, about the black American soldiers who took San Juan Hill and the portly white colonel who stole their story and fame.

  When Leah went to Mayarí searching for news about her husband, she saw for herself how the Americans had set themselves up to govern. Taller, thicker, and better dressed, they would push the Cubans around as if they had been the enemy. At one military camp she saw hundreds of Spanish cadavers being burned by the U.S. occupation forces and wondered if the wives and lovers who were waiting for those men back in Spain would ever know the real fate of their loved ones. Vultures circled above the crackling fires and stench, quietly waiting their turn.

  Antonio didn’t turn up until several years later, after the U.S. invaders had left. He limped up to the house, balancing his weight on his new peg leg, claiming to have been a victim of cannon fire, amnesia, and politics, a virtual prisoner in a Havana hospital. Never having been convinced of hi
s death, a gleeful Leah took him back on the spot, wiping his brow, boiling soup from lamb bones, bits of yuca, plantains, and wild basil.

  In 1904, two years after the Cuban republic was established, she bore Sima, blue-gray–eyed like Antonio, a fountain of sweetness, a child who barely cried, just looked around as if in shock at the wasteland into which she had been brought to the world. She would grow up with neither her mother’s severe beauty nor her father’s brio, but with her own healthy radiance, prudent and reliable.

  For Sima’s naming ceremony Antonio and Leah couldn’t find a Jewish virgin (there was only one other anusim family immediately nearby, and none of its members were young women) to be Sima’s godmother, so they resorted to recruiting a black girl named Lucía, who assumed the wholly improvised rite was just the Garazis’ own style of orisha worship. It was performed in utter secrecy, of course, with the windows closed in spite of the suffocating heat (they still put out saucers of milk and honey for the visiting hadas). They dipped the baby girl in a basin of warm water and tossed coins and gold into it for good luck. In the end, Lucía left there no longer sure about what she had seen, not sure at all if Antonio and Leah’s strange rites and prayers weren’t all devil’s play.

  Two years later, when he was twenty-five years old and Leah was twenty-three, Antonio met The Moor. He came home from Mayarí in a tizzy, talking nonstop about the salesman’s brazen admission. “He just said it! He just said, ‘I’m a Jew!,’ just like that,” he exclaimed, amazed the man hadn’t been consumed on the spot by the native anti-Semitism.

  Leah winced. She knew from Antonio’s stories about the hospital in Havana that he’d met American Jews, doctors and soldiers who let him know about their common faith. Since their arrival, there were even public worship services in Havana. But she considered that their ability to function as public Jews had more to do with their U.S. citizenship than with any new tolerance. Now here was this Lebanese man, brown as mahogany, stirring things up. She remembered The Moor’s effortless smile, the easy credit terms she was sure could bankrupt them, the neckties and Catholic icons in his wooden peddler’s box.

  “Since when are you so religious anyway?” Leah asked her husband, who usually had to be reminded to come pray as she lit candles on Fridays.

  What Leah didn’t realize was how badly Antonio wanted to leave Oriente, to go to the city. He argued with her at every turn, ridiculing her paranoia when strangers came by and noticed the mezuzah awkwardly hidden inside the elaborate branches and leaves that served as decorations on the door frame, or wondered why their candles were braided and how it could be possible that everyone in the family should have an aversion to pork, Cuba’s most abundant meat.

  It took Antonio six years to work up his nerve, six years to put a few pennies together, and to realize Leah would forever be a crypto-Jew, trapped by tradition, habit, and fear. One day, he came home from the mill, black with dirt, his skin covered with the usual cuts from the cane stalks, and told her he wanted to be called Ytzak—the Spanish spelling deliberately jagged, the same way Hebrew letters might seem to the unknowing, so as to provoke questions—that he was leaving, that he would walk back to Havana on his peg leg if he had to.

  “There has to be another way,” he said. “I can’t be pretending I’m only half of who I am.”

  “But this is who we are,” Leah said between sobs.

  Two years later, in 1914, Ytzak posed for a photo with the founders of Chevet Ahim and sent a copy to Oriente with The Moor (with whom he also occasionally would send some money). Sima, the daughter he missed growing up, pinned it on the wall next to her mother’s bed, where she slept now that her father was gone. She wouldn’t see him again until many years later, after she’d married Luis San José, the son of the only other anusim family they knew, and news reached Ytzak that she was pregnant with his grandchild.

  At that, Ytzak immediately packed all of his belongings, said good-bye to the Corwens, and headed back to Oriente.

  One steamy day many years later, Ytzak struggled up the path to the house he shared with Leah, shaking his head in disgust. Not far away, the earth was scorched, the sweet smell of blood and sugar rising in spirals from the cane fields. It was 1932. He was fifty-one years old, his hair a soft white haze. His grandson, for whom he had left Havana and come back to the countryside, was nearly twelve, practically a man by rural standards. Ytzak steadied himself on the painful prosthetic that left the soft flap of skin on his knee red, often bleeding from sores.

  “What’s going on?” Leah asked, gazing at the increasingly black sky. She had not grayed quite like her husband, yet the sternness of her expression made her seem like a schoolmarm always ready to impose detention.

  Ytzak collapsed in a rocking chair, grimacing at the sharp ache from his war wound. “The foreman at the mill, Morales, accused the campesinos of being Communists, tried to get them all fired,” he said. “That’s their response.” He pointed with a nod at the fire in the distance, clearly visible through the bush. “Then they killed him.” He sighed.

  “They killed him?” She drew her arms across her chest.

  Ytzak nodded. “Slashed his throat,” he said, “then cut him into pieces with their machetes and let the dogs at him. It’s enough for me, Leah,” he said. “It’s enough.”

  She didn’t need an interpreter. “What about the store?”

  “Do with it what you please,” he said. “I’m not taking anything with me.”

  “Except Enrique,” she added bitterly. The corners of her mouth dropped like little steel clamps, harsh and cold.

  “If he wants to come,” Ytzak said. All he could dare to do was hope.

  In a few days, Ytzak and Enrique were packed, saying good-bye to Sima, who wept, and Luis, who paced in dismay, knowing that it was useless to stop Ytzak, and now convinced that there was no place in Oriente for a delicate boy like his son.

  “Perhaps,” he had told his wife the night before their departure, “he will find his destiny in the city.” Lovely, sweet Sima cried into his shoulder; she had never counted on losing Enrique so soon.

  As they prepared to leave, steely Leah gave her grandson a formal, chilly embrace and wished him well. Then she turned away, walking back to her house with her head held stiffly, never once looking back on her husband.

  “Write us, Enrique, write us—promise that you will write,” Sima pleaded with her boy, who promised he would do so every week as he buried his nose in her hair (perfumed with the tangy scent of lemons)—a pledge he kept until she died.

  Ytzak and Enrique climbed into a horse-drawn cart and galloped off to Santiago, from which they took the train to the capital, repeating what had once been another fateful journey. Ytzak waved his straw hat while Enrique beamed and laughed from nervousness and joy.

  Sima held on to her husband’s arm with both hands, her flawless peasant’s face red and wet from crying.

  After her husband left, Leah kept her house sealed, letting no one in but Sima, who resented the drama of her father’s abandonment and its fallout. Sima wanted things to be normal—whatever that was—to stabilize, to calm down. But her mother insisted on bleakness, on hibernation and shame.

  During this time, the store remained closed, too, the plank of the counter leaning against a wall. The neighbors all knew Ytzak had left Leah, although not his motivations, and they stayed away. The situation was embarrassing, after all. Moreover, of the couple, it was the eccentric Ytzak the locals had liked, with his war stories and warm smile, not Leah, who frowned and always kept to herself, almost as if she considered herself better than them.

  Occasionally, an unwitting salesman would come by, hawking linen guayaberas or bottles of fancy perfume. Leah wouldn’t answer his knocks, preferring to stay inside in her darkness until he gave up, bewildered by the lack of hospitality, and went off to Mayarí to find out what happened from the gossips who hung out on their front porches, rocking and twittering.

  One day, a particularly incessant peddler app
eared hauling two huge wooden crates of women’s underwear. He rapped on the door and cooed in a language she didn’t understand. When Leah didn’t answer, he took residence on the porch, swinging in what had been Ytzak’s chair and slicing a juicy mango with a pearl-handled knife. The fruit smeared his chin and dripped between his legs. When he was finished, the man leaned back on the rocker, put his feet up on the railing, and pulled his hat over his head.

  Leah stayed up all night, pacing, worried about the stranger on her porch. When dawn came, she peeked out into the thick morning mist only to find him urinating just off the wooden deck, not at all worried about whether anyone could see him. He aimed his piss in an yellow arch and laughed. She drew back in amazement.

  By noon, the man was conducting business off the porch, yelling at passersby with his gravelly Germanic accent. He would draw a few folks forward, rattle off his pitch in his native tongue, which caused the natives to laugh and snicker, and barter by holding up his fingers for the price he wanted in one hand, a pair of panties in the other.

  Later that evening, still ensconced inside the house, Leah heard another pair of footsteps on the porch. These were heavier, blunt. Then she heard a voice she recognized—Tatán, a local fruit and vegetable vendor, a huge black man—ordering the stranger off the porch. When the peddler laughed at Tatán, Leah heard a growling like an animal—a tiger or leopard perhaps—a scratching on the wood, then a clatter, the stranger’s bloodcurdling scream, and the fast clip of running feet.

  That was how handsome Tatán began to court my great-grandmother. When she opened the door to see what had happened, he pulled off his hat, bowed his head, and asked her forgiveness for intruding in her life uninvited.

  “I think a woman like you deserves more respect than that man was offering,” a gallant Tatán said.

  “Gracias, gracias,” Leah said, blushing. Her rigidity just melted away then, the lines around her mouth suddenly seeming almost like dimples.