by Achy Obejas
That has been happening a lot lately. We’re experiencing unexpected blackouts. There is nothing to do then, nothing to say. Ester gets very tired very quickly when that happens. She tends to just go to the bed (then she gets up at the crack of dawn, with the roosters that you can now hear all over the city).
But I can’t sleep no matter what I do. I have taken to walking around the neighborhood. I walk slowly because I’m suddenly very tired, too, but I can’t sleep anyway. In the early evening hours, people just hang out outside, playing dominoes by moonlight, reading the numbers with their fingertips like blind men. Citizens sit on their stoops, staring at nothing. There are also a lot of lovers who, with nowhere to go, must resign themselves to that same stoop. I see them all entangled, rather shamelessly actually, their dark faces melting one into the other. Havana is suddenly a city of shadows.
I’m sure you heard about everything that happened at the Spanish embassy. Poor Angela, she had to stay there through the entire crisis, until Spain recalled its ambassador. It was very hard on the entire family. Nobody knew what was going to happen. Angela said the people seeking asylum were all men, all very desperate it seems, and they wouldn’t talk to her, even though she was in charge of the paperwork for their requests—the asylum-seekers wouldn’t talk to any of the Cubans who work at the embassy, insisting they were all spies for El Comandante—and ended up threatening the Spanish employees there, although I don’t know how, since they weren’t armed. Thank god nobody was taken hostage, as happened at the Czechoslovakian embassy. It is all very delicate.
What I still don’t understand—perhaps you can explain it to me—is why these people want to leave. I know life is hard here—it will get harder before it gets better, I can feel it in my bones—but it is our country, after all. Who will defend it if not us? How can they want to go the U.S. when it is the source of all our problems?
Please don’t read this as a recrimination. I am not judging you in any way. I know you were just a baby when you left and had no input in that decision. I also know some of the machinations of that decision and I do understand—your father was never entirely comfortable in Cuba. He suffered a lot here, he felt very alone (until he met your mother).
Has it been better for him there? I suspect from your letters that he has finally found a place where he is comfortable, although I confess I marvel at your description of your parents’ neighborhood as Jewish. Here your father didn’t want to be around anything or anyone Jewish. When he was young, he had to be, because of Ytzak, but he never chose it of his own volition.
It’s getting dark here so I have to finish this letter. Again today we have no electricity. Please take care of yourself, Alejandra.
Un fuerte abrazo,
Moisés
P.S. Thank you for the vitamins. We are saving them for Paulina, who will need them most. We are also taking solace in the Goodwill Games, where we won over the Americans so spectacularly that the mercy rules had to be put into effect!
25 November 1990
My dear Alejandra,
I think you are too hard on your father. Just like you did not choose to go to the United States and be an American, he did not choose to be a Jew. Yet he’s stuck with it, with all that knowledge, all that anguish in his blood. It’s not unlike your situation as a Cuban in the U.S.: Even if you wanted to assimilate, to become one of them, you would still know in your heart that you are Cuban. You could not deny the experience of your mother’s saints, of this revolution. It has affected your life in a way that no American could possibly know.
So it is with your father and his very reluctant Jewishness. It is not a product of being in the U.S., it’s the way he’s always been, except for a very brief awkward but still golden moment back in the thirties. When he hastened back to his shame, I fought with him all the way, but it was a battle I couldn’t win. His demons are more than 500 years old, his experiences very different from mine: I have known all along who I am; he found out later in life and had to accommodate to that new and harsh reality. Imagine his dismay when he discovered who Saint Esterika really was!
Perhaps it has made it so that he is now always anticipating that what he knows as truth will mutate, maybe he is simply that much more fragile and believes the world can change in the blink of an eye. I always think of him as a man more capable of seeing the flaw on the baby’s cheek than its exuberance at being alive. There was always a sadness about him. Has that changed? I hope so.
Things here are both hectic and slow. On the one hand, change is constant—there are new laws, new regulations for everything every day. But the process of change itself is slow. Nobody really knows what’s going on, and they’re afraid everything will change again soon, so every step is taken very cautiously. Moreover, sometimes—with no electricity and no water or fuel—slow is the only speed available to us.
We are doing better here at home. We recently got bicycles for everyone—Orlando’s car is no longer working, as there is no fuel—and this has been a good thing. Everyone is getting plenty of exercise, even Ester, who initially refused to ride. Deborah, who is in art school now, has gotten very creative and is making drawings from coffee grounds and (I don’t approve but it doesn’t seem to matter), of all things, menstrual blood. Everyone assures me this is a phase, just like the Special Period itself.
Angela continues to work at the Spanish embassy, where things have calmed down considerably. She got Orlando an interview with a Spanish investment firm, Grupo Sol, which is planning some businesses on the island. I don’t know much about any of this, but after all these years and so many achievements, Orlando says he is sick of being an economist. I worry about foreigners in Cuba and about members of my own family working for them, but what can I do?
My problem is that I want Cuba for Cubans, not to the exclusion of others but so that we are not under anyone’s boot. I often wonder how much of this desire comes from being Jewish and my generation’s understanding of the Holocaust. I look at everything going on in Israel, with the intifada and the killings, and I think sometimes those are the consequences of our fears run amok.
Sometimes, I confess, I worry about my own capacity for extremes. Recently, some food concessions were opened in Havana, fast food, just like in the U.S., and people here were delighted, calling the sandwiches “McCastro’s,” and just the reference to the U.S. made it impossible for me to eat them. They were very popular for a while, then everybody found out they were made, at least in part, with soy, and Cubans—you know, carnivores that we are—rejected them fast. I suspect they’ll all be closed by the end of the year.
I’m rambling now. Thank you for the new supply of vitamins. I promise we will all take them this time, not just Paulina.
Un fuerte abrazo,
Moisés
P.S. I know the Vatican announced the pope will be here by the end of next year, but I’ll convert before that happens!
2 January 1991
My dear Alejandra,
We finally met Seth when he brought your letter. What a fine young man indeed! We were happy to see that you have remained friends, that because of you he is concerned about us, too.
Aside from the medicines and the art supplies for Deborah that you sent (she’s still using the coffee grounds, too, but, to my relief, has stopped painting with blood), he brought us jeans for Rafa and the girls, which pleased them tremendously, and small goodies like soap and perfume for the women. Orlando refused his gift of a shirt but accepted Seth’s offer to work for him as a chauffeur while he and his crew were here. Seth had a rented car and it was all very official, although terribly bureaucratic. Orlando earned dollar coupons that we were able to use at the diplo-tienda, which made Ester very happy.
Orlando, however, is not in very good spirits these days. He did not get the job with Grupo Sol after all. They are building a big new hotel in Varadero and will use some Cuban workers. They needed management consultants with a knowledge of finance better acquired in capitalist countries, and c
onstruction crews. But Orlando is neither as young nor as strong as other men who applied. I was relieved but he was distraught. He feels responsible for us—he thinks we cannot survive on the ration books because of the scarcities. As you know, there are lines everywhere these days. Sometimes it takes eight hours to buy onions, or a pair of shoes. Just recently Orlando was fined for being a colero—somebody who holds places in line for others, an act that is illegal when you charge for it. Then his frustration simply turned into shame.
I don’t know what to say to him. I know we will be okay, but I don’t know how to convince him that the revolution will take care of us, and so we both suffer. It reminded me of when your great-grandmother died, how your father blamed being Jewish for her death, and all I could do was put my arm around him and pat his shoulder. I was as inexplicably silent then as now.
In your last letter you asked me to tell you about a time when your father was glad to be a Jew. There was a period, I believe, when being a Jew symbolized both community and hope for him. But that same moment turned catastrophic and is what made him turn away most dramatically. To this day, I am not allowed to speak about it. I promised him this many years ago, in 1939, and time does not diminish that commitment.
I must confess, Alejandra, that I find it most extraordinary that he still prays on Friday nights. In Chicago, even surrounded by Jews, there is no obligation for him. I suspect there must be something in those moments of faith that makes him glad to be Jewish. Ask him. Perhaps he will surprise you.
Un fuerte abrazo,
Moisés
P.S. To answer your question, Saint Esterika is a purely marrano invention: They Christianized Purim by making Ester a saint. When your father found out nobody else in the world did that, he reacted the way Christian kids do when they discover the Three Kings are just their parents delivering presents on the Epiphany. He was miserable, defrauded, for weeks.
XXIII
Talk to me.
That’s what I always wanted to say to my father.
Talk to me, tell me everything. Tell me about those days of confusion when your family finally revealed its true self—and yours— like a glass onion, each of its layers splintering, by accident and on purpose.
Had you wondered why your family lit eight candles on Christmas? Why linens were changed every Friday without fail? Or why, when a piece of bread fell on the floor, you were required to kiss its grainy face before biting into it?
“You are a child of Abraham, of Moses and the patriarchs . . .” somebody finally said to you, perhaps Ytzak, tears shiny on his beaming face, free at last to tell the truth; or maybe it was Luis, with a less poetic pronouncement, certainly, but with a voice as resonant as the shofar. (It would not have been Sima, with her timidity, nor Leah, with her resentments.) Or perhaps you realized, in the hazy hues of candlelight at the Menachs’ home, that certain pieces of your personal puzzle had been haphazardly hidden from you.
Discovering god, I think, must be as mysterious and frightening as sex. Not the rituals, the methodology, but the purpose—the capricious responsibility of life, the strange and wonderful discovery of bliss. Fear of god, I think, must be something like fear of our own selves, of our bodies, of the pleasurable fluids and the latent illnesses that abide within. God, like sex, reflects our morality and mortality: In their own timeless ways, we use them in the present to relieve us of the past, to conceive a future. We use them to get beyond death.
I imagine you as a boy with a heart as pure as spring water, winding through your paradisiacal wonderland of hardwoods and opulent flowers, silky vines framing every scene, each one more beautiful than the one before: a hollow log filled with luscious honey; blue, red, and yellow-striped snails climbing impossible heights with their sticky feet; a wild lamb and her still wet ewe murmuring under a shady tree.
I can see you awed—your senses at their peak—the way you could not understand the connection you knew to be true between the lamb and the hatchet in your father’s hand.
Talk to me, Papi.
Tell me how you thought you were Isaac—Ytzak!—a prince and heir to the kingdom, and discovered instead that you were the bastard son Ishmael, spared by god but erased as the legitimate firstborn by the very circumstances of your birth.
Who am I in all this?
I’m a stranger, as out of place as a whale whimpering on the shore, a lute, a hairless native pretending to live free.
I’m my father’s daughter, mindful of both the mystery and the exodus, but I am also heir to my mother. I ask the requisite four questions at Pesaj (always at a friend’s house, never in our family home), but I also lay sunflowers and roses at the feet of the Virgin of Charity and arrange for fruit to ripen at her altar, peaches and bananas that turn black and viscous.
Like him, I’m a child of Amos, forever critical and self-critical; like her, I am a consequence of events beyond my control—and utterly practical, capable of creating god out of matchsticks, if necessary.
Like both of them, I believe god is everywhere, so I am constantly on the lookout, constantly glancing over my shoulder (like those Cuban TV announcers), under my bed and in the rearview mirror. But unlike them, I am ill at ease with all this vigilance and eavesdropping, with the idea that I might need to be protected. I always keep a light on, whether a candle with a saint’s elaborate and kitschy image or the overhead lamp in another room.
The problem is that when I stand alone before the mirror— that’s me there, the one with the blue-gray eyes just like my great-grandfather, my mother’s pouty pillows for lips—I know everything and nothing at all, and I am overwhelmed, unable to look myself in the eye, struggling to swallow and to breathe, thinking always: Like the emperor, I have no clothes, no clothes.
Who will see my naked beauty, who will love me now?
Whenever I watched my father as he descended to his subterranean kingdom on Friday nights, his shoulders heavy with the weight of history and surrender, I wanted to run after him, grab him by the arm, and shake him.
Why? Why do it? I wanted to ask. Why not let it all go? What was the power that held him so even after whatever tore his soul in 1939? Why couldn’t he put it all away and decide it was all fanciful mythology?
I watched him go down, step by step, just like the sun outside the windows of our house, all orange and yellow blazes. My mother and I would then go our own ways—she to the den for TV or downstairs to her own mysteries; me to my bedroom to sulk and ponder the riddles of life, then later, out, out of the house, to the joys of dancing, the tingle and fear of a mouth wet on my nipple and the heat of another’s body, mortal and beautiful, hovering above mine.
In truth, I already knew the answers to my father’s Friday night obligations. Like every ancient human who ever wrote on a clay tablet or cave wall, we both understood the cosmic sympathies between our guts and the moon’s cycles, our brains and the scattered constellations, the rhythm of our earthly hearts and the eclipses of the sun and the moon.
When my father prayed, he pondered this: Perhaps god is a construct, but perhaps not. Perhaps light is a metaphor, simply what happens when we think we’ve found an explanation for what frightens us; but perhaps, too, it stands outside of us. Maybe the first sentient being to discover light did so not by the magic of internal illumination but by opening her eyes, seeing what was already there. The dark, perhaps, was not ignorance but the mere back side of an eyelid. (My father would take no chances.)
And heaven?
This is where he and my mother traded theologies, sitting there in the den—he in one of his rocking chairs, she on the couch, surrounded by the billowy, dizzying clouds of tobacco from the puro in my father’s immaculate hands and perfect mouth.
“There must be something to that word,” he would say aloud, “or it would not even exist.” He would gaze at my mother through the brushstrokes of white in the air.
“Heaven is here,” my mother would reply, smiling in her own knowing way, “right here, right now.”
/> XXIV
When I was with Leni, I thought a lot about my parents.
I thought about the way they laughed together, the way they sat comfortably in silence as my father stared at his letters and my mother paid the bills, how he’d find her in the kitchen with his scribblings in his hand and read them to her for approval, sometimes so absorbed in his own words and the sounds of his voice that he never looked up, never made eye contact with her, but just listened and nodded when she finally talked, listened and nodded until he was swaying, lost in his difficult and particular paradise.
She’d say it wasn’t quite right yet, or she’d suggest another word, or she’d say “almost, almost” in the most indulgent tones, the most soothing and satisfying of whispers. He’d hear her like the wind in the mountains, naked to the eye but irresistible.
“Yes, yes,” he’d respond, “of course”—as if it were all as obvious as uprooted trees and rippling waters.
Then he’d rush back down to the imperturbable confines of his basement office and scratch and peck again until she said, “Oh, yes, that’s beautiful, Enrique!” And with that, he’d lean back and straighten his shoulders, sigh, as if he had known what he was doing all along during the arduous scale to the top.
When I was with Leni, I thought about them because I wanted what I had with her to last, to mark me the way I knew love had shaped my parents. I wanted to breathe the same fresh air, to survey the world from the same heights.
It’s not that I had my parents idealized. In fact, as a young woman, I was embarrassed by their togetherness, by what I thought was my mother’s submission and my father’s helpless vulnerability. They had often seemed stuck—together, yes, but trapped by their needs and desire for warmth. My parents, I thought, had never been hot, had never felt the discomfort of their own fires.
How, I wondered, could she have chosen him, this awkward and shy man, when she obviously could have had so many other options? And why had he—so much older and lonelier—waited so long for love? How did they know?