by Achy Obejas
The trip back to Oriente proved both dramatic and fatal for Sima. It took more than a week of riding in trains that slowed to a crawl due to lack of fuel, trains packed with campesinos and brigades of surly urban workers heading to the interior, skinny chickens and pigs on their way to slaughter, men snoring and pissing on the rails between cars. Her traveling dress soaked through with her own perspiration, causing her chills; it became infused with cigarette and cigar smoke, the stench of diapers and vomit, and of rotting meat. The heat was like a weight around her head and neck, like a big sticky pillow that shed cotton and feathers and refused to let her breathe. Once, against her better judgment, she accepted a glass of water from a peasant woman who insisted she have some, her lips having cracked dry by then.
Sima came home to Luis with a burning fever that turned her skin red like a Russian tourist. He put compresses on her head, fed her chicken broth, injected her with the free medicines the local doctor prescribed, but nothing worked. She came in and out of consciousness, sometimes not recognizing where she was at all, other times chatting away as if she was a young woman again and they could steal some private moments rolling around the aromatic tobacco that Luis had once tended behind their tiny home. Amid the babbling, she told him something about her trip to Havana, about the way her heart leapt when she first heard the Amidah murmured by so many voices.
When Sima finally died and a heartbroken Luis called to tell Ytzak, who despaired knowing he would not be able to attend her funeral, the old man insisted his daughter had renounced all her pretensions to Christianity in Havana and that she should be given a proper Jewish burial. For Luis, this was a nightmare—Sima never told him this, although it was also clear to him that something had happened in Havana, that perhaps a change had occurred in her. But what was that change? And if she had in fact come out of her long imposed religious exile, what, exactly, was a proper Jewish funeral? The last living marrano in the world, lonely Luis had no idea.
In the end, he did the best he could: He had one of the few remaining priests in Oriente give a blessing at the burial site (just in case Ytzak was wrong) and then, later, when no one was around but the cemetery keeper—a drunken old fool given to visions no one believed anyway—he draped himself in a threadbare prayer shawl and, in the full light of day, recited the kaddish.
On Sima’s simple headstone he had her name and the dates of her life engraved, bookended by a Christian cross on the right and a tiny Star of David on the left. It never occurred to him to look around, that the odd pairing was already echoing through the graveyard, especially in the older, decrepit tombstones from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which Christian trinities and crucifixes were often accompanied by six-pointed stars, now-faded engravings of Torah scrolls, and artfully disguised tetragrammatons.
In Chicago, my parents grieved as much for Sima, who was not just my father’s mother but suddenly the symbol of all things maternal, as for their lack of clairvoyance.
“The vulture meant Sima after all,” said my mother between sniffles.
“It was literal then?” I asked, remembering the lesson they had tried to impart to me.
I wanted to mourn with them, but at twelve—the revolution and I had had a birthday since Moisés’s first telegram about Ytzak’s illness—death itself was too far away, and Sima, my grandmother, was a figure I could only reconstruct from photographs and stories. Since both the photo albums and my parents were still there to recreate her, it was nearly impossible for me to conceive something had happened to her. I knew that if I went to my father’s desk and looked, she’d still be there, framed with my grandfather Luis on the porch of their simple home in Oriente: modest, unadorned Sima, with her hair in a bun, her eyes as clear as the sky, just like Ytzak’s and mine, but without our intensity.
“Yes, yes,” muttered my father, his large body imposing again, now laid out on the couch as if it were ready for internment. I remember he still had on his dark business suit when my mother told him about the wire from Luis, how she’d led him to the couch where he lay stiff and still as she sobbed beside him.
“And the angel?” I asked. “The angel was Abuela Sima disappearing into Cuba, right?”
My father scowled. “No, it was—” then he stopped himself and exchanged a quick, cautious glance with my mother. “Yes,” he said, “that’s exactly what it was. You were right.” There were centuries of denial in that look.
A week later, Luis died in his sleep without warning. The news reached us through Moisés. No one said the kaddish for him until many, many years later, when Ernesto, Moisés’s oldest son, found himself on a work brigade in Oriente, constructing homes for the campesinos. He said he had no trouble finding my grandfather’s grave in the cemetery outside Mayarí—it was next to Sima’s, with an identically marked tombstone, the work of a laborer who, without specific instruction, simply copied the wife’s iconography for the husband.
XXVII
On my first trip to Cuba, after the first few minutes of confusion and tumult upon my arrival at Moisés’s family home, his son, Ernesto, and I sat outside on the stoop for a bit, sipping from glasses of rum that melted the ice he had beaten to pieces for me. He nodded next door to the building where my family and I had once lived.
“It’s funny that you came back,” he said, one of the few times I heard something less than sweet in his voice. “It seems that everybody who’s ever lived in your apartment leaves, like there’s a curse or something up there.”
I looked up at the balcony, chewed up by rain and wear. “Well, your father says that the man who lives there now—David—is just in Trinidad visiting his girlfriend,” I said. “I didn’t get the impression he was going anywhere else.”
Ernesto shrugged. “He wanted to leave but he can’t,” he said. Even though he was thirty years old, his cafe au lait skin was smooth as a baby’s, as if he were incapable of growing a beard of any kind.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he wanted to leave the country,” Ernesto said again. He looked at me with his big raccoon eyes, perhaps a little condescendingly. “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I think if people want to leave they should be able to leave. I’ve thought about it, too, except it would kill my father. Everybody here thinks about it, at least once. It’s normal for islanders. And if something’s forbidden or made nearly impossible, then it becomes that much more enticing, don’t you think? But David did more than think about it.”
According to Ernesto, when he was just a young man, David— big, blondish, and easygoing—had made a request to leave the country, claiming an aunt in New Jersey would sponsor him in the United States. The aunt was certainly willing but her husband died before David’s paperwork was finished, and after they finally figured it all out, the aunt wound up on public assistance and unable to help him.
That petition for asylum proved costly for David: Even after he’d resigned himself to staying in Cuba, it followed him like the stench of his uncle’s rotting corpse. “Compañero,” a sour-faced bureaucrat said to him when he tried to get an athletic scholarship, his index on the petition in David’s files. The bureaucrat shook his head from side to side without saying another word, just “compañero” over and over.
And so, in spite of his speed and strength, David was kept away from any possibility of developing whatever athletic potential he had. “What would be the point?” Ernesto said sarcastically. “If David became a great baseball player or javelin thrower or whatever, who would he compete against? No one was going to let him go to the Pan American Games, much less the Olympics.”
When David tried to study medicine, an academic counselor showed up with the file under his arm and claimed that, because of that petition, it was unclear whether David really understood his debt to the revolution. Frightened by the visit, David set out to prove his commitment, volunteering to take on additional patients at the neighborhood clinic, joining cane cutting brigades, staying up all night for neighborhood watch, often taking on
extra turns to relieve his elderly neighbors. Soon, David was falling asleep from exhaustion in his classes, unable to focus and read the Latin script on the medicines he was supposed to prescribe. He began having nightmares about making mistakes, his patients purple with poison in their systems.
It wasn’t long before David tried to leave the country again— this time much more dramatically, on a raft constructed from inflatable tubes and a carved-out tree log. He was caught just off the coast of Cojímar and sentenced to three years in prison. Due to Moisés’s intervention on his behalf with Johnny Suro, who was then married to a woman whose brother was a colonel in the Ministry of the Interior, David only served two years. But within days of his release in late summer of 1980, he was scrambling down to Mariel harbor, desperately trying to find a boat that would take him during that chaotic and explosive exodus.
“I tell you, though, he’s cursed,” said Ernesto with a bitter laugh. “I mean, he’s just not meant to go, you know?”
During the Mariel crisis, Ernesto had been a committed young Communist who’d riled a bunch of compatriots to go taunt those who were leaving. “¡Qué se vayan! ¡Qué se vayan!” they screamed, their throats sore from the litany, their arms numb from flaying in the air and throwing things, skin burned from exposure.
“The thing is,” Ernesto said, “you get caught up in it, in the moment. You don’t even know why you’re doing it anymore, but you can’t get away from the noise in your own head and you forget you’re yelling at people you know, people who were your classmates, your girlfriends. I had an ex-girlfriend leave via Mariel and it was like a stake in my heart, like a betrayal, like she was fucking Uncle Sam in his vilest most disgusting guise right there in front of me, just to humiliate me—it was personal, you know?—and suddenly I’m yelling at David . . . like it had to be David, it couldn’t be somebody else. I’m saying things like ‘maricón’—imagine how embarrassed I am about this now—I’m yelling ‘traidor,’ ‘escoria,’ you name it, like I hate David when, in fact, he’s my neighbor, he’s this guy who always had a big crush on my sister and we all sort of felt sorry for him ’cause he was a nice guy, but my sister, well, my sister wasn’t going to go out with just anybody, you know.”
That’s when David, who had always been something of a gentle giant, suddenly stepped out of the boat he’d finally climbed into, grabbed Ernesto by the throat, and, without saying a word, began to pummel him right on the beach. Two lost teeth and a shattered rib cage later, Ernesto was saved by a pair of soldiers who put a gun to David’s head and threatened to blow his brains out.
“He served a few months for that,” Ernesto said, sighing. “My father talked to Johnny Suro again—I think my dad knows him through your father. Anyway, they decided he’d been punished enough. He’d missed his boat, he couldn’t really get a decent job. My ribs never healed right, they hurt when I run or swim.” He touched his torso with his fingers, as if checking the dressing on a wound. “But that’s okay, I deserved it.”
I looked at him, unsure how sincere he was.
“Really,” he said, as if he’d read my mind. “Now I just feel sorry for the guy. You know the only thing they’ve let him do? Sign up for an army tour in Angola, that’s what. The poor motherfucker figured he’d seek asylum in South Africa or something, but just before he left, he fell in love with this girl from Trinidad. That fucked everything up; he had to come back because she was pregnant. Then she lost the baby. And then he began to have all these strange pains in his joints. It turned out he’d picked up some horrible parasite or virus; I’m not really sure, but something awful. Cuban medicine’s fantastic but they don’t quite know what’s wrong with him, and there are days he’s as stiff as a piece of wood, he can hardly walk down those stairs. And now he really can’t leave; he’s not going to get free doctors like these anywhere else in the world.”
It would be years before I could appreciate the ironies in Ernesto’s story. Back then I just listened to him talk, with his self-deprecating manner, the way he would incriminate himself then shake his head and look off to the now darkening skies. At different intervals during the story I wanted to ask him questions, but each time I’d open my mouth, he would wave his hand in the air, begging me to let him finish, his eyes glistening.
“Hey, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, swallowing hard, “it’s kind of selfish of me to indulge like this when you’ve got your own Mariel tragedy, which is so much worse, really.”
The Mariel crisis began on April Fool’s Day in 1980, far from the harbors, outside the secured walls of the placid peach-colored Peruvian embassy on Fifth Avenue in Miramar, when an exasperated bus driver crashed his minivan through the front gates, scattering the guards with his screaming pleas for asylum. To everyone’s amazement, the Andean ambassador acquiesced to the driver’s request and, in a pique, Fidel removed his sentries from the embassy, leaving the stately, terraced mansion vulnerable to the desperation of the more than ten thousand Cubans who quickly filled its yards. (The house was later turned into a museum about revolutionary triumphs, and later still, razed.)
“¡Qué se vayan! ¡Qué se vayan!” yelled many of those standing outside who were staying behind. Their faces were red with rage, veins throbbing, fists bloodless. They exercised their limbs by pitching things over the walls, especially the identity cards the refugees had tossed away in disdain.
Inside the embassy compound, a constant fusillade of rocks and bottles, eggs and feces came over the fence. Those inside—packed face to face, shoulder to shoulder, buttock to buttock—laughed giddily as their bodies became covered with sticky egg whites and runny yolks, rotting food and gooey excrement. They stunk from the garbage, from their own joyful and acrid sweat and the need to take care of their bodily functions in the very spot in which they were standing. They talked standing up, prayed standing up, slept standing up, ate what little came over the walls standing up.
Outside, others stood beyond the barred gates, reaching over with their hearts if not their still and empty hands, too frightened to move forward, too anxious to return to their Havana homes. They just stared and imagined themselves hopping over the fence—it wasn’t even five feet high—saw their own ghosts leaping, vaulting over the multitudes.
On the second day of the siege, Cuban soldiers surrounded the embassy, a heavily armed cordon of menace and might. If someone outside tried to hand over a bowl of rice and beans to someone inside, the deadly police batons would come down hard, bones breaking, bowl flying, rice in the air. Eventually, it was the soldiers themselves who were forced to feed the thousands in the Peruvian pen, passing out trays of drippy beans and barely steamed potatoes that never made it past the first few hands extending out from the gates. Among the future exiles, fights would break out over a piece of bread, knives were shaped from rocks and belts, men—and women, too—became scarred, both inside and out.
It rained sometimes during the siege, and some of the interned Cubans would reach up to the clouds with outstretched arms, to get as much of the refreshing water as they could. Others would simply turn their faces toward heaven and let the rain wash them clean, slowly soaking through to their skins, making them new.
For nearly two months, the Peruvian embassy housed the ten thousand as they slowly trickled out with safe-passes, some of them refusing to leave altogether, convinced they’d be arrested, torn to pieces the minute they set foot off the sacred grounds. These men— it was mostly men, young men—had to be convinced, some forcibly dragged away.
When it was all over and done with, when the last of the refugees got their visas and were finally escorted out of the compound (even as Mariel harbor leaked thousands and thousands more exiles into the sea, all headed north or to their watery graves), the embassy grounds had been trampled flat. Not a live blade remained, not a flower survived. It was all brown mud and debris.
And there, amid the shredded papers, the discarded chicken bones and plastic bottles, the torn rags, loose and unmatched shoes, coconut sh
ells, putrid eggs, dried shit, and broken glass, were the crumpled remains of my great-grandfather Ytzak, his eyes open as if in perpetual shock, just like Olinsky’s, his face turned to the embassy wall.
No one recognized him at first. His body had shrunk to the size of a tote bag, all rolled up and flat. Against the wall, with his back to the thousands, his white hair and dirty Dril 100 suit merged together so that he looked like discarded linen, somebody’s lost shirt or jacket, not a person at all. He was a light, little thing. The only reason it took more than one paramedic to remove him was because his body had been broken in so many different places that his limbs and torso went every which way, like a loose bag of stones. His peg leg was missing, the blood glazed black on his stump.
No one knows how Ytzak got there, whether he made the unlikely decision to seek asylum in a moment of clear-eyed logic, whether age and fear conspired to panic him, or whether he simply got lost in the crowds, a frail ninety-nine-year-old man swept up by a wave of desperation and desire, the fleshy tide of ten thousand of his brethren pulling him under until he couldn’t breathe.
In Chicago, a slow-motion volcano gushed from my father when he heard the news: All that was in him came spilling out, a thick lava fetid and sick. For days, he lingered in his bathroom, his giant body in a continual aftermath and eruption, upturned and ominous. During this period of mourning and mortification, my mother would occasionally push in buckets of ice, fresh towels, glasses of mango juice. Outside the bathroom door, we’d hear him wail and whimper, like some great injured animal.
In August of 1994, after Leni and I separated, I took a vacation by myself to St. Maarten, a tiny Caribbean island, thirty-seven square miles of hearty hills and tourist traps divided between Dutch and French authorities.