by Achy Obejas
Then one day, in a letter with a typical listing of tragedies but still imbued with Moisés’s unshakable faith in the revolution’s ability to come through, we got the news: Félix, Celina’s brother, had killed himself sometime the previous summer, as the entire island was celebrating another brilliant baseball victory during the Pan American Games. He had been accused of a political infraction, told he would be forbidden to leave the country, perhaps forever, and he’d become despondent.
But the manner of Félix’s death was something else entirely: Unable to find a length of rope, he had wrapped his neck in one of his father’s ties and, while sitting on the floor, forcibly hung himself from a doorknob. I could have never imagined him capable of such an act. It was Celina who had found him, framed by the door, a trauma serious enough to have caused her to be hospitalized until just recently.
“That means your pinup girl can’t be her,” Leni said immediately. “I don’t know which is worse, though, really . . . ”
All I could think about was how badly Félix must have wanted to kill himself to do it in so willful a way.
I didn’t take down the framed photo of the semi-nude girl in Havana. Instead, I bought more flowers and added a clear glass of water for good measure.
Though I’d resented Félix terribly when he had spied on Seth and me, his was the first death in Cuba I had to deal with as an adult. It caused an overflowing and restless anxiety. Not only was there the surreality of the circumstances, but time and detachment had distorted Félix, too. Suddenly he was not some sadistic voyeur but a funny, almost pathetic fellow, someone I could feel for and mourn.
I knew even then that what was most unsettling was the question that Félix’s death provoked: What would happen to Celina now? Though I already knew she lived alone, I began to imagine Félix as her guardian angel, as the brother who bridged the distances to bring her news, food, and affection. (I put aside the question of Orlando, understanding too well that her brother’s death might make her even more dependent, more vulnerable to him.)
In response to the news about Félix, I wrote Celina a short note in care of the Menachs, bought her some blue jeans and a green pullover (with the pinup girl as a guide to what her size might be), packed some pens and soaps and tampons in a box and sent them down with a Catholic delegation working against the blockade.
“Let me get this straight: All this for someone you didn’t even talk to?” asked Leni, adjusting and readjusting the metal bands on her wrists. “I think your little fantasy’s getting out of control here. . . .”
In the meantime, I tried to get Félix out of my mind. For months on end, all I could see was his body, hanging lifeless from the doorknob of the bedroom I’d once shared with Seth. In these terrible nightmares, whenever I approached him to undo the tie, he’d wake up, cackling madly just like when we discovered him snooping on us. I’d shoot up screaming, the sheets scrambled about the bed, my skin cold from sweat.
“Sweetie pie,” Leni would whisper each night, her body stretched over mine as if to protect me, “you need some closure, you need some closure.”
Sometime after that I found a picture of Félix and us that Seth had taken the night of his visit. He was so skinny, so brittle. In the frame, he’s looking at the two of us instead of at the camera. Seth is beautiful and in love. My eyes are downcast and ashamed.
I pulled open my desk drawer, took out a pair of scissors and clipped Félix out of the scene, propping his figure like a cut-out doll against the glass of water I’d set for his sister. Then I went rummaging through my bookshelves, the ones way above head level, until I found what I knew was the answer: “Y’hey sh’lama raba min sh’ma-ya . . .”
XXVI
Death in Cuba—as aloof as this may sound—is a literary phenomenon, at least for those of us who are not there. They do not really occur as events, but as narratives, each one with its own complicated unfolding, its cast of characters and subtle plots.
What informs us are the details related by others: “Félix,” wrote Moisés, “hung himself with a silk tie, black with a white stripe down the center, a little blue apostrophe somewhere in the middle.”
I couldn’t imagine the temperature of the room; Félix’s cool, hard skin; or whatever bitter bile had leaked from him. I never saw the tie undone (by whom?—Celina, a paramedic, Orlando?), or whether his eyes were open or shut, if they covered him immediately or if he stayed that way, the red streak across his neck exposed for a minute or two, or longer.
But even when I couldn’t quite picture his body dangling limp from the doorknob, I could see the little blue apostrophe on the tie, signaling a contraction, the swallowed vowel stuck in his throat, and Félix taking possession of his fate. There was a hush to Moisés’s voice on the page, the kind of reverence for the event that comes much later, after the shock and hysterics and denial of real life.
Death in Cuba is sometimes foreshadowed, as in most good stories, although the metaphors in real life tend to be mixed, not quite as orderly as literature. That was the case with my grandmother Sima.
The first sign of her death came early, in 1970, when my mother rushed home one day almost in a panic, convinced she had seen a vulture—“There are no vultures in the U.S., Enrique!”—and that this was an omen of some sort. The creature, its mighty wings still and silent, had circled my mother as she lay back on the little pier at Jarvis Avenue, coming within only a few feet of her, so that she felt the force of the wind rushing under it and the heat from its breast. She was sure the bird, with its awful, militaristic shadow, had come with a warning for her, not about death exactly, because that would have been too obvious, but certainly to prompt her into a spiritual evaluation or cleansing.
My father, had he been anyone else, perhaps might have raised an eyebrow at my mother’s reaction, or concerned himself with the way her hands shook over the bathroom sink as she washed her face and neck over and over, hoping in that manner to get rid of the vulture’s terrible sensation. But instead he listened intently to her every word, to her divinations, and then suggested something else entirely, though the way he arrived at his particular meaning had nothing to do with his own beliefs but rather with his perception of hers, and what she might find plausible.
“The vulture is not just necrophilic, it’s nurturing, too; a martyr in its own way,” he said, rubbing his beard as he watched my mother soaping up yet again.
“Nurturing? A vulture? Enrique, are you crazy?” my mother protested.
“No, I remember seeing them in Oriente, swarms of them, sometimes the sky was black with them,” he said. “Anytime anyone died, especially unexpectedly, or when animals were slaughtered, especially sacrifices . . . But I also remember when there was hunger, when there was nothing for them to eat, how the mother vulture would offer her own blood to her nestlings that they might survive.”
“You saw this?” my mother, the urban child, asked.
“Yes, with my own eyes: I watched a nest of vultures survive that way,” he said. “The mother eventually died but the baby birds lived, as if the mother understood the difference between the present and the future, and the importance of continuity.”
My mother dried her hands—all the while considering this— kissed my father’s cheek, and disappeared into her room to move glasses of water about.
Later, when the ten-million-ton Cuban sugar harvest failed, my father asked my mother if she thought perhaps that that had been the vulture’s real message, and maybe it was possible the revolution was waning. My mother weighed his question but decided against that interpretation—she, too, is a translator, in her way—convinced the vulture had meaning, but that it was personal, and that she was still missing vital elements in order to decipher it.
That same summer, my great-grandfather Ytzak, who was then eighty-nine years old, became very ill. We got word via Moisés, who sent a Western Union telegram to my father, saying the old man seemed to be going under. I remember my father sitting by the phone, jotting down
every word from the wire service as it was read to him, his usually graceful hands suffering a horrible case of the shakes. When I peeked later at the notepad on which he’d been scribbling, it contained nothing legible, only the kinds of scraggly lines found on medical charts.
“What can I do?” he asked my mother, who stood above him, kneading the tense and unfortunate muscles of his shoulders. My father’s face was darkly molded into an expression of utter impotence.
“Nothing,” my mother said, “nothing,” kissing the top of his head, her hands at work on him as if he were the earth she had learned to soothe and manipulate so expertly.
But my father felt incapable of simply sitting there, waiting for the next morbid wire. So he spent a week attached to the phone, trying to place a call to Mayarí, where my grandparents now lived, so he could talk to his mother.
It was all instinct on his part because Sima had very little contact with her father; his final desertion of Leah had made it virtually impossible for her to even look at him. Ytzak’s behavior at the funeral had been the last straw for Sima, his comportment a kind of madness from which she had willfully distanced herself.
What my father hoped to accomplish with this call to his mother was a puzzle to both Nena and me. To tell her the news? Surely Moisés or someone else had done that already. To commiserate with her? That was, at best, a tricky proposition, as there was no guarantee that Sima hadn’t already sat shiva for Ytzak long ago, in her own way.
What was certainly unexpected was the reception my father got when his father, Luis, by then hard of hearing and retired, came to the communal phone at the neighborhood pharmacy in Mayarí.
“Sima? Why, she’s in Havana, with your grandfather,” Luis lisped through his toothless gums.
Enrique just about dropped the phone: “¿Qué qué?”
“Yes, he’s very ill,” Luis continued, his voice grave but still strong, even through the static and unmanageability of his own flaccid lips.
I was only eleven then, with barely a memory of my grandfather’s stout little self, but I clung to my father’s shoulder just like my mother, trying to listen in. It would have never occurred to us then to eavesdrop on another extension: The idea, although unspoken, was to be as physically together as possible, especially during those times when it was clearest that we were separated from others we loved. Up close, climbing all over the mountain that was my father, I could hear not just my faraway grandfather but my father’s intimate breathing, the way his body jerked when he learned his mother—not exactly sprightly at sixty-six—had taken the arduous, almost impossible train ride through the rugged countryside from Oriente to Havana.
“Oh my god, oh my god!” my father exclaimed, his hands so sweaty that the phone slid right through them and my mother had to clasp her own fingers over his to hold it in place.
For days after that call, my father paced nervously from one end of the house to the other, addled, as if he might run into walls, muttering to himself. He was pale and cold all the time. He could barely eat; whatever food he ingested came up. I noticed that by the end of the week his clothes were looser, especially his pants. He tried calling Moisés, but the Menachs didn’t have a phone then and so it entailed calling a neighbor who wasn’t always home, and who didn’t even seem to know who Moisés was sometimes.
“Ah, ¿el turco? Sí, sí como no,” he’d say, then rush out to find Moisés, leaving my father hanging on for fifteen, twenty minutes (at about two dollars a minute in those pre–direct dial days) only to return to the phone and say he didn’t see him anywhere and he couldn’t go down to the Menachs’ house because he couldn’t leave his own mother alone, and besides, didn’t they have two houses? Which one did my father want him to go to? Was he sure the Menachs still even lived in Havana?
At about this time, my father began to have dreams about a wounded angel. It would begin in Havana, on our balcony on the dawn of the invasion of Playa Girón, as a black shadow dropped from the sky. In the dream, my father thought it was a bomb of some sort, except that, like the vulture that had visited my mother, it left a residue of sensation, like a rush of feathers fanning his face.
When he looked over the balcony, however, it was not a bird, not a crow as he had imagined, but a badly battered angel that lay on the ground. The seraphim, neither male nor female by his estimation, had bloodlessly torn a wing, its clean white bones protruding from its shoulders. In my father’s dream, the Havana street kids—orphans and tiny hustlers, neighborhood kids who played baseball between cars all day—stuffed the bone back in and patched the wing by tearing pieces of their own clothing. When the angel finally came to, cradled in the arms of the urchins, its face was as dirty and innocent as theirs.
In his dream, my father threw the angel a rope down from our balcony, but when the creature finally reached our apartment and tried to fly from there, its wings sputtered and it fell into the panicky crowds. The angel then picked itself back up, wiped its face with an arm that now sported a wristwatch, and disappeared into the tumult, where the cops were swatting people with billy clubs and the street kids were back to playing ball.
My father did not have this dream once but many times, with slight variations but always the same general format. Once, he saw his mother in the crowd, but both he and my mother dismissed it, convinced she was imposed on the divine message because of his worries about her, not because she was actually an organic part of the vision.
They pondered my father’s dream for weeks and weeks, each consulting their own gods, my father rummaging through book after book while my mother played with her water glasses, until they finally determined the dream was a sign of approbation.
“The angel is us, irreparably wounded because we left our country, of course,” said my mother. “We threw ourselves into the sea like the angel threw itself into the air.”
“And it disappears into the unruly crowd—which is the United States, that’s clear—the way we are also becoming a part of the fabric here, in spite of our injuries,” my father quickly added.
Even then, I thought they’d skipped something, and in one of my first and last excursions into their realm of prophesies, I posed a question: “But doesn’t the angel disappear into Cuba, into a Cuban crowd?”
“Well, yes,” said my father, clearing his throat, “but it is important, Alejandra, not to translate things too literally.”
“The angel comes from the crowd and then disappears into it,” said my mother.
“No, it falls from the sky,” I said, all adolescence.
“Yes, yes, but then it’s with the children, who are part of the crowd, and it returns to the crowd,” my mother insisted, annoyed with me. “So it can’t be that the crowd is Cuban because, though we are Cuban, we can’t return, even if we wanted to.”
About two months later—and long after Sima’s death—an exultant letter arrived from my great-grandfather Ytzak, his florid script practically dancing off the page. He was much better; his daughter Sima had come to Havana and they had gone to the synagogue together!
Of course, my parents didn’t share this with me at the time, instead they told me that Sima had revitalized the old man with her presence, that he’d gotten well enough that they were able to go for walks through Old Havana and visit friends of his to whom he had proudly introduced her.
“Una guajirita en la capital,” my father sighed, happy and sad and amazed at all of it.
I imagined Ytzak using a cane and, like a tropical Colonel Sanders, waving to the neighbors as he strolled through the district, my grandmother Sima like a Southern belle on his arm, her skirts wide, her demeanor shy, even a little embarrassed.
Years later, after my father’s death, I would find Ytzak’s letter among his personal papers and read about the reconciliation not just of father and daughter but of Sima and her ancestral faith.
“It was the proudest of days!” wrote Ytzak. “My daughter and I at temple together. I sat as close as I could to the women. I wanted to look a
t my daughter. I hope god forgives my lack of concentration—it was a dream come true for this old man to see his baby (no matter how old she may be), there, finally, in the House of David.”
It was hard to tell which synagogue they had gone to—in Cuba, they are all orthodox or conservative. I guessed it was Chevet Ahim or Adath Israel, a more recently constructed orthodox temple in Old Havana, because Ytzak preferred always to stay in the colonial district, even if it meant attending services that were more emphatically Ashkenazi (he may have even preferred them, it’s hard to tell with him).
Sima’s visit had lifted him right up out of his sickbed, made him strong again, satisfied and busy. He took Sima to museums and parks (shopping was pretty much out of the question, since after the zafra’s failure, even the little that was rationed had become even scarcer, and more precious), to dinner in Chinatown, to free classical music concerts, and to a rare and splendid poetry reading by Eliseo Diego. (Another poet, Nicolás Guillén, was in the audience and this seemed to thrill Ytzak just as much.)
Years later, Ester would tell me how Ytzak completely overwhelmed his daughter, how she would come home with aching, swollen feet and pounding headaches and collapse on his bed while he, still energized, still infused with the miracle of their reconciliation, would stay up for hours, reading Torah, working himself up into ecstatic frenzies of prayer. Sima would hear him from the bedroom, buzzing like a swarm of bees.
What Ytzak never saw was that while Sima surprised even herself by being delighted with the fact of the temple—she, too, had cried at her first public service; she, too, had shivered upon hearing aloud the barely recognizable prayers she had said in whispers all her life—she was also aghast at the way the handful of old women in the female section chatted and gossiped through the prayer service, or that while he flitted about excitedly, she still recoiled from acknowledgment outside of the synagogue walls. Nearly five hundred years of shame and fear lingered in her soul and would not be exorcised so easily.