Days of Awe

by Achy Obejas

  I’d look at Leni as she slept at night, searching for clues. She’d cuddle up into a ball on the very precipice of the bed as I followed the line of her curling spine and wingless shoulders with my kisses.

  Then she’d open her eyes, startled. “What? What?” Her bracelets tinkled.

  “Do . . . do you love me?” I’d ask, pleading, teasing, unsure of my own intentions.

  My father was my mother’s first love, but not her first boyfriend.

  Before she met Enrique my mother was attached for a while to a young man named Jorge Ortega, whose university career consisted of paying people to take his exams while he raised hell out on the streets. Jorge came from a wealthy family, with country club membership and the means to rush him out of the island whenever his political activities became too dangerous.

  My mother did not love Jorge Ortega. I don’t believe this out of any particular loyalty to my father but because I absolutely trust my mother would admit it, the same way she freely confessed he was her lover, and playful as a kitten in bed. In fact, given my mother’s age and status in Cuba, it would be easier and make much more sense to say she had loved Jorge and never confess they’d slept together, much less that she had enjoyed it so much.

  I’ve seen pictures of the two of them. Jorge is a tall man, even by American standards, robust and bright-eyed, always at ease, his arm around my mother’s waist. He looks fascinated with her in every photograph, ready to drop to his knees at her request.

  My mother, on the other hand, is merely amused in these photos, biding her time, already waiting for her somber prince.

  Curiously, though my mother was my father’s first real relationship, the first person with whom he enjoyed the protocols of passion, she was not his first love.

  Before he saw his destiny with my mother, my father glimpsed love with another woman, a dark girl, a doomed girl.

  He never spoke about her, never even said her name aloud.

  It would be on his deathbed, fifty-eight years after his singular meeting with her, that my father would instruct me to find a blurry black-and-white photograph of a girl on a ship’s deck—she’s sixteen or seventeen perhaps, with black curls and Anne Frank eyes, dressed in winter clothes while looking out at sunny Havana harbor—and ask me to give it to Moisés Menach.

  In the photograph, the girl is clearly posing for the camera, for the man whose loving eye is capturing her beauty and glee. She is waving with one hand, her knobby knee jutting out between the railings.

  To this day, I have a hard time imagining that the object of her mild flirtation is my father.

  My parents met as if in a tacky Hollywood movie at the Hotel Nacional in Havana, poolside as my mother lolled with a frisky Jorge Ortega. She was sitting on a stretched-out towel, taking in the sun; Jorge was splashing in the water before her.

  My father, who was waiting tables there, bumped into her by accident, nearly spilling the drinks he was taking to a group of American tourists sitting with their feet in the blue chlorine. But the drinks—mojitos the way Hemingway would have liked them—did not overturn. My father balanced the tray expertly, dancing around my mother in a rare moment of grace, as if there was an exquisite bolero for a soundtrack. When they realized they’d averted disaster, they both laughed, flushed and relieved.

  My father thought Nena was beautiful, like so many of the girls who came with their rich dates to the Nacional’s pool and bar.

  My mother instantly recognized that Enrique was the end of her waiting, the end of shuttling back and forth between relatives and living with strangers. How did she know? She can’t say, even to this day, laughing and shaking her head at the mystery. What is certain is that she left a frowning Jorge Ortega sitting in wet swimming trunks on the edge of the pool and followed Enrique inside to the bar, where the rest of the wait staff looked on in surprise that someone so young and stunning should be drawn to Enrique San José.

  “Don’t I know you?” she asked him.

  And he said—delighted, radiant with confidence—“Shouldn’t that be my line?”

  When I reached my twenties my mother told me the rest, how she pulled him into a kiss the other waiters celebrated with cheers and applause. Enrique’s knees wobbled, his eyes wide as she led him away by the hand, out of the hotel, down to the miraculous reef off the Malecón, where they sat out of view, touching and kissing wordlessly until the sun set.

  My father’s amazing hands, she has since told me, were designed by god for making love.

  My mother’s life is an open book, a story without missing pages. To every school year, there is a corresponding grammar book, an adolescent uniform. For every summer, there is a new chapter about Barbarita and Wang Francisco, a garden full of roses.

  There is never a story about my mother’s life for which there is no evidence. In each case, there’s always an image, a ticket stub, a pressed flower, or a chorus of witnesses.

  Nena married my father only weeks after meeting him, a giddy bride in a simple white lace dress hanging off his arm outside the notary public’s office just off the majestic Prado. In the few photographs, they’re at the front door, on the steps, and her hair is tossed back with abandon, her arms clasped around his neck and shoulders with a feverish possession. The dates printed on the white borders of the photos indicate that virtually no time elapsed between the poses with Jorge Ortega and these ecstatic moments with my father.

  Enrique, however, looks traumatized—his eyes glassy and wide, his elegant hands a smear. He is wearing a crisp linen suit and his face is shiny from sweat.

  The only witnesses to the wedding are my mother’s cousin Gladys and Moisés Menach. She looks puzzled, her smile lopsided. He is tickled pink, both of his eyes bright with delight.

  It’s different with my father.

  Though he seemed the picture of coherence—it is hard to imagine him, really, outside of his study, even when photographs suggest he’d been elsewhere, younger and leaner—there were huge black holes in his life. When he finally and reluctantly talked about himself, my father skipped over whole decades sometimes, hoping that no one would notice.

  I asked, time and time again, about those blank years before he met my mother, about the time when he first arrived in Havana as Ytzak’s young ward, and his answer was always the same.

  “Nothing ever happened to me,” he’d say, shrugging. “Everything was happening to everybody else, with the war in Europe and all that. I was just a bystander. I read the papers every day and, sometimes, I prayed.”

  At this point I’d always indicate that there was a vast expanse of time, a little more than a dozen years, between the war and that fateful afternoon at the Hotel Nacional, but he’d just shake his head.

  “Nothing happened, honest,” he’d say, smiling shyly. “I was a young man in Havana, doing what young men do. It was a very ordinary life.”

  There are a few favorite anecdotes, about seeing Fidel’s name in the papers after the Moncada attack and realizing this was the same brash boy from the river, about the first and only time he went to the Tropicana, that luxurious and decadent outdoor venue, to hear Nat King Cole sing and how it had drizzled just enough to make it seem like snow falling.

  “In my youth, there was a favorite street corner, San Rafael and Galiano in Havana, which was known as La Esquina Del Pecado,” he’d recall, settling into one of his comfy rocking chairs, lighting a sumptuous and trimmed cigar. “On one side there was the Fin de Siglo department store and on the other, El Ten Cents. Across the street there was El Encanto and a Florsheim shoe store.”

  With Havana in my head, I’d be instantly distracted: I’d quickly color in the storefronts, imagine the glass windows, the advertisements for specials, and the crowded sidewalk.

  “The afternoons were marvelous because all the shop girls would parade by, beautifully dressed and trailing the most rare perfume,” he’d continue, smoke gathering around him like gentle ghosts. “They were perfect, but with an air as if they didn’t ca
re, as if they didn’t know about their own perfection. And we—the boys—we’d gather on the corner to render tribute. We had a constant commentary, a rhyme, a riddle, a compliment, for every young woman who walked by. Of course, they ignored us, ignored us almost completely, but when one of them liked what one of us said, she’d smile a little shyly, and we knew, we knew right away.”

  In Rogers Park, where the dialogue on the streets was rougher and more direct, where there were so many languages at my schools it was hard to conceive the possibility of subtlety, I was intrigued by the codes my father talked about. “So what would you say, what kinds of things?” I’d inevitably ask, and my father would just as predictably jump back, startled at the question.

  “Well, no, I didn’t actually say anything, but my friends did,” he’d say, then smile again as he drifted back to his cloudy, pastel memories. “If you had a girlfriend or you were meeting a girl you liked, you always met her there, at San Rafael and Galiano. You could go to the movies from there, or for a stroll. Or maybe to a dance at the Centro Gallego or Centro Asturiano, or to the Parisian cabaret in the Hotel Nacional. Everybody would end up in the wee hours at the Plaza del Vapor, to warm up on a little bowl of soup before going home.”

  It wouldn’t be until much later, when I was tucked in between warm blankets in my room, that I’d realize my father only made cameos in his own stories. Instead of memories, his recollections were photo captions for tourists, snapshots of an idyllic and faraway moment in time.

  When Leni and I broke up, it was sudden but calm.

  “I don’t know you,” she said to me one day after five years of coupling. “It’s not as if I don’t know you anymore. It’s as if I’ve never known you.”

  I wasn’t startled or hurt by this. I had absolutely no defense: I stood before the mirror and saw a thirty-five-year-old woman with just a dash of gray in her hair, slender but with round balled muscles for calves—and hips, of course. My eyes turned dark then—black, black pools, just like my father’s. My hands, however, were totally unlike his—nails jagged, the cuticles bitten and bloody.

  During our time together, Leni and I had developed routines for work and play, hours of the day in which we knew to stay away from each other, and others in which we touched without even thinking about it.

  There were weeks when Leni vanished, off on video shoots, business trips, or lectures, and though she called needy and girlish from her hotel rooms, she came back glowing each time.

  I had my leaves, too, though not as frequent, and always draining: to Nicaragua after an earthquake, with aid workers who didn’t speak Spanish; to Puerto Rico after hurricanes; to Indianapolis for a custody hearing. I always came back jaundiced and ill-tempered, unable to speak about what I’d seen, my hands trembling.

  Most of the time I locked myself in my office at home, put Ernesto Lecuona or Antonio María Romeu on the stereo at such a low volume I could hear them only when I looked up and away from my work, more and more of it on videotapes (while I was with Leni I got into subtitling for industrial and educational films as a respite between catastrophes), all of which I left in tidy piles next to my computer at the end of the day.

  When Seth and I broke up, it had been a hideous, violent day of argument, recriminations, and the occasional slammed door and tossed shoe. But when Leni and I finally decided to separate in 1994 after five years, there was a stillness, as if the earth had ceased rotating.

  We spent the day making love, touching with uncommon tenderness.

  XXV

  One day, three years before we parted, Leni answered the phone and found herself talking to an officious Cuban operator who asked her in fractured English if she would accept a collect call. I wasn’t home but Leni said yes anyway. The caller, it turned out, was a young woman in some sort of panic, and where and how she got our number was a mystery to both of us. She spoke only Spanish, and Leni not a word, so the questions lingered.

  I don’t know why but at first I thought it might have been Estrella, the Cuban interpreter with whom I’d remained friendly in an official sort of way, but it didn’t make sense that Estrella wouldn’t speak in English; she was, after all, flawlessly fluent. We considered, more logically, that it might have been Deborah or Yosemí, Moisés’s granddaughters, but I was certain if there had been a family emergency it would have been Moisés himself, or Ester, who called. I imagined it would be Angela, with her job at the Spanish embassy, who would have the best chance of getting through.

  After much debate, we decided I’d place a call to Moisés’s house in Havana, friendly, just in case the call had had nothing to do with them, but open enough so that if a crisis was at hand we could help. It took hours to get through, even with patient and sympathetic operators—at first the line wouldn’t connect, then the call would crash instantly, or we found that even screaming into the phone, they couldn’t hear me. We’d stand there helpless, listening to their faraway, echoing voices asking who was calling, debating among themselves who could be calling.

  At some point, Ester and I finally heard well enough to recognize each other, but after some awkward greetings and exclamations of surprise, she offered nothing dramatic enough to have justified a call, and Leni and I, now more confused than ever, sat on the couch dumbfounded after it was all over.

  “She did sound sad,” I said to Leni.

  “How could you tell—you were both screaming,” Leni said. “And besides, everybody in Cuba sounds sad.”

  “Not everybody—”

  “Oh, please!” Leni said, exasperated.

  In good Cuban fashion, I contemplated extremes—that the call had been some sort of test from state security, that perhaps it had been designed to tap my phone by the CIA, or that maybe even Moisés himself might be a part of some larger conspiracy and had placed the call as a way to acknowledge contact with me to someone else.

  “You are nuts,” Leni said, incredulous. “Maybe, just maybe, I didn’t understand and the call wasn’t from Cuba at all.” Her bracelets rattled with her quick, jerky gestures. I think she wanted to slap me, like in the movies, to bring me back to my senses.

  But I was convinced the call was from Cuba—Cuba calling, if not Estrella, Deborah, Yosemí, or Moisés, then the island itself, a chorus of ghosts in limbo.

  In March of 1991, as Cubans reached a kind of numb nadir, Playboy magazine did a spread of women on the island (amazingly enough, apparently with the cooperation of Cuban authorities), that would ultimately serve as a portent of things to come. Leni and I sat on the couch reading the article, convinced all the models would be out of the country in a matter of months, courtesy of marriages—arranged, willed, or bought—with foreigners.

  “This is at the pool at the Hotel Nacional, where my parents met,” I explained to Leni, ignoring the desperate, leggy girl strewn on the chaise longue in the photo. “And this, obviously, is a rooftop in Miramar, what was once the poshest neighborhood and where a lot of the embassies are now.” On the page, a young woman raised her arms in the air, exposing beautiful, natural breasts, firm and brown, through an open shirt.

  “This is so twisted,” Leni commented. “It’s like they’re officially advertising sex tourism.”

  One particular photo caught my eye and it was not because of the cityscape. In it was a young, caramel-colored beauty, her hair long, lush, and wavy, naturally streaked with a rainbow of browns and reds, and an irresistibly sensual but melancholy gaze. She was not entirely nude, managing to show just a few curls of bristly black above a casually draped towel. Her breasts were ripe buds, the aureoles like drops of butterscotch. The caption identified her as Marísol and said she was an engineering student but she seemed too young to me to be in college.

  “This is the girl,” I said, astonished.

  Leni understood my meaning immediately. She sat up right away and examined the picture up close. “Really? Do you think? My god, she could be at the Playboy mansion as we speak, swapping blow jobs for freedom!”

  I cut
the photo out—just around the face, so that no one would ever suspect her nudity or the source—and found a simple frame for it on my desk. For days afterward, I contemplated her while I worked: the smoothness of her skin, my memory of her marine essence. I’d close my eyes and try to focus, imagining that moment when she leaned back with Orlando between her legs, the way her eyes sparkled and welcomed me. But every time I tried to configure her face—its actual color and tone, the shape of her nose—my mind would become a wash of intense white light and I’d lose her.

  “Are you sure it’s her?” Leni asked, amused as much as anything else. “I mean, you know, beautiful fourteen-year-old girls don’t necessarily grow up to be beautiful seventeen-year-olds. The real Celina might have gotten acne, or needed glasses, or maybe her teeth rotted.”

  I didn’t mind Leni’s gentle teasing, perhaps because in my heart I wasn’t entirely sure it was Celina at all, but also because, in a way, the banter kept Celina fresh for me in a way I had never expected. As if to seal our bond, I bought a small bouquet of yellow roses and put the vase by the picture frame, an offering to Ochún, the Virgin of Charity, patron saint of Cuba, and of love.

  By the winter of 1992, we were used to hearing about the hardships described by Moisés: the never-ending lines, the blackouts, the food shortages, the daily debacles, even the new emerging blindness and immobility some Cubans were experiencing.

  At the Menachs’, it was Rafa who was afflicted. We got updates with each letter about his condition: a debilitating weakness, swollen joints, extraordinarily painful and too frequent bowel movements. “It’s as if he’s atrophied,” wrote Moisés. “Not his body so much, but his heart and mind, his experiences.”

  Rafa spent weeks on end paralyzed, a younger, sickly version of Rodolfo, the mummified TV-watching old man who seemed immune to the conditions, so bad by then that even Fidel allowed that Cubans would have to “create miracles” to survive. Leni and I sent medicines whenever we could, vitamins and foodstuffs, especially powdered milk and eggs. We consulted with American doctors about Rafa’s symptoms, offering advice whenever medicines weren’t available.