Days of Awe

by Achy Obejas

  The French side was picturesque, its architecture echoing for me the kind of quaint colonial style I had seen in Havana: two-story homes with balconies from which people peered out all day, their poverty evident regardless of the past grandeur of their homes (now divided into many, many homes) or the defiant dignity in their eyes. The French islanders were not friendly. They made no effort at all to speak English but were occasionally willing to have an exchange in Spanish, thinking I was—depending on the situation, my dress, and my attitude—either an oil heiress from Venezuela or another undocumented Dominican come to clean hotel rooms and steal a job.

  I stayed on the Dutch side, in one of many luxury time shares (a lawyer friend had loaned it to me for my getaway), nestled among the casinos and sugar white beaches, in a suite with a living room, a terrace, and a Jacuzzi that could have hosted a half dozen guests. The bedroom had two overwhelming king-sized beds covered with blue bedspreads that undulated with my weight as endlessly as the turquoise water outside my patio. My view was clear: white plastic beach furniture, New Yorkers burning brown while reading Stephen King, a few red-roasted children making sand castles, and a handful of charcoal-skinned natives, all peddling palm frond hats and cheap jewelry, or dressed in cabin boy whites and happy to replenish towels and drinks.

  At first, I tried desperately to engage with my surroundings— parasailing, scuba diving, window shopping, playing endless blackjack. I didn’t want to think about Leni, all snappy somewhere by now, drawing admirers like moths to a flame, and perhaps as deadly. I wanted to warn them all, to explain that to love so completely is to perish. I wanted to wave flags and caution everyone—the girls who were too good to die so young, the boys who didn’t understand and didn’t deserve so ecstatic a finale—that they were better off going about their business, having fun, just like me. But then the limber young woman who tugged on the pulleys of the parasail would wink at me, just like Leni, and I’d plunge, not into the sea or the sky, but back to my last descent into Leni’s lushness, the way she could make time stand still with a kiss.

  I got plenty of attention, attention I didn’t care about in the least—from the taxi driver, a Saudi businessman, the Canadian flight attendant, and everybody, it seemed, in the casinos. But like the young man who backed up his car at the entrance to the time-share complex and punctured his tires on the steel prods designed precisely to stop that sort of thing—he was yelling at me, “Take me with you, oh my princess, please”—I found it all too crude or ridiculous or both. I wanted to get away from Leni, but her jangly wrists were always playing somewhere nearby, causing my thighs and pelvis to ache.

  Then one afternoon, leaning against the bar while ordering my third Havana Club (legal in St. Maarten), I forgot all about Leni: There on the big screen TV behind the counter, surrounded by twinkling bottles of spirits as if they were altar pieces, the azure of Cuba’s shoreline appeared, shattered by hundreds and hundreds of bobbing brown bodies floating on the surface.

  “What’s going on?” I asked no one in particular.

  “It’s Mariel all over again,” said the bartender, a handsome, serious man who was efficient in his job and rarely spoke. “Fidel has given them permission to leave.” He wiped wet tumblers, setting them in a tower on the bar counter.

  I squinted at the tube. I hadn’t been paying attention to the news. All I had been obsessed with had been my own pain, my own singularly smashed little heart, so Cuba had been far, far away—like a dream I once had, or a bill I had forgotten to pay. Now I plopped down on a bar stool, recognizing the stubby grass of Cojímar just off the emerald sea, and I felt overwhelmed, guilty, and suddenly very afraid.

  “How long has this been going on? I mean, what happened?”

  But the bartender didn’t get a chance to answer me.

  “It just started a few days ago, but it’s picking up now,” a young man across the way said in a fractured English. If his accent hadn’t told me he was Cuban—all open-mouthed and cocky—surely his posture would have: He had come-on written all over him, languid and insolent. His dark good looks weren’t as dreamy as he imagined, and the body he was showing off with his Speedos and fishnet top was flabby in places he would have never acknowledged, but he was, all of a sudden, a terrific distraction.

  “¿Qué pasó?” I asked, switching to Spanish.

  He was so delighted—“¡Ay, pero si hablas español!”—he came right over (he would have anyway) and stood next to me, his hand on the back of my stool and giving me one of those burning Cuban gazes. I gazed right back, a little drunk and much amused.

  His name was Roberto. “Well, what do you know about Cuba?” he asked, sipping his drink with the same hand with which he held a cigarette between his fingers, his lids lowered so that I might imagine him in a more vulnerable state. “Just so I know how much I have to explain,” he added, trying really hard to sound sincere.

  “I’m Cuban,” I said with a laugh.

  “Nooo . . . ! You’re not Cuban! You’re Cuban? Really? But you were born in the U.S., no? Really, you’re Cuban? From where?”

  I explained and then he explained: That he was right off the island, on a mission in St. Maarten with a colleague from the Ministry of Tourism, sent to look at time shares to try to develop new ideas for Varadero. I laughed, he laughed. All the while, his hand was traveling: from the back of the stool to my shoulder, then to tip my chin, then to pat my exposed thigh.

  We were in my room in record time, with him stroking above me like an Olympic swimmer destined for a record. When he finished— with a grimace and a high whistle—he rolled over, his upper lip covered with beads of sweat, patted me on my naked butt and flipped the TV on with the remote. The room was instantly filled with balseros, up close this time, paddling and waving their arms at the cameras while the water splashed about them.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Just taking a break,” he said, grinning.

  “A break?” I couldn’t believe it; it had taken him—what?—a minute and a half ?

  “Well, and also . . .” He was immensely pleased with himself. “I’m checking in with those poor sons of bitches. I mean, I’m here, with a beautiful girl—with you—and two days from now, I’m flying to Miami.”

  “What?” I was thoroughly confused.

  “Yeah,” Roberto said, even cockier now, stroking the soft dark curls on his chest with his gluttonous hand. “I’m, like . . . defecting!” He cracked himself up, laughing with his tongue hanging out. He and his colleague had it all set up with the French consulate on the other side of the island. They’d fly to Miami, disembark, and plead for asylum. “What do you think now, huh?”

  “I think you owe me,” I said, reaching down to the wet, limp worm between his legs.

  “¿Te gustó, eh?” he asked, leering, getting hard from the idea that he was such a stud.

  “No, I didn’t like it,” I said, climbing on top and guiding him, “so now you’re going to make sure I do.”

  Then I tugged at him hard, as if he were an unreliable, rebellious sloop while, on the TV screen behind my back, Havana continued to overflow into the sea.

  “There you are!” a woman’s voice exclaimed behind us. It was many hours later.

  My Cuban lover turned around slowly from the bar, his lids and lips droopy, a mug of coffee steaming in his hands. He said, “God, am I . . .”

  I blinked.

  “Alejandra?” the woman said, ignoring him. She was my mirror, only darker, beautiful.

  “You know each other?” Roberto asked, astounded.

  We hugged like long-lost relatives, kissed each other’s faces and necks, even cried. It was Estrella, years later, her body toasty and warm like bread.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said, holding her by the hands as we stepped back to appraise each other.

  “You look exactly the same!”

  “No . . . look . . . gray hairs!”

  “It makes you look interesting, debonair,” said Estrella,
laughing.

  “You know each other?” Roberto asked again, slurry as if he were drunk from the coffee.

  We sat down, Estrella and I, our hands locked together, one on top of each other, amazed. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “So . . . eh?” Roberto said, this time his voice trailing off as he threw himself into a comfy cushioned chair. The mug managed to slide onto a little side table before his eyes dropped shut.

  “I’m with him.”

  “You mean . . .”

  “Oh, god no, on a business trip,” she said laughing. “I work for the Ministry of Tourism now.”

  “You’re his colleague! My god, and you’re defecting, is that true?”

  “What?” Estrella yanked her hands away, her eyes quick daggers at Roberto, now slumped in the chair, snoring. “Is that what he told you?”

  “It’s not true?”

  “Ay, Ale, life is so complicated,” she said with a sigh. “No es fácil.”

  We left Roberto in his slumber and walked outside. The night was balmy and clear, stars glittering overhead. She did not want to leave but she had allowed things to move along, to see how far fate would take her in another kind of test, one that had nothing to do with politics and which I understood completely: She was in love with her boss, a much older and very married man.

  “I thought it would be just fun at first,” she confessed, her eyes glossy. “But then I found out I could barely breathe without him, I needed him far more than I ever imagined.” She hid her shame by turning her face to the darkness.

  But he would not leave his wife, would not even entertain the possibility, and she couldn’t bear to continue as his mistress. As soon as she arrived in St. Maarten, she called him and told him that unless they could be together, she was staying—asylum would force her to live without him. When he didn’t respond, Estrella let Roberto— who was crazy to leave Cuba—make all the arrangements.

  “But I can’t really fathom Miami,” she said. “The last time I was there on business everyone kept offering me steak—no matter the time of day or the circumstances. It was all, ‘Let’s talk about it over filet mignon,’ ‘Here, let me buy you a sirloin,’ ‘Come over, I just put two juicy slabs on the grill.’ I was nauseous the whole time. But to go back . . . especially now, after telling him . . .” Her voice trailed off. The water whispered along the shore, its black surface lined with light.

  “You still have a couple of days to think about it,” I said, taking her hand like schoolgirls and leading her back to the bar. “I think, though, right now we need to rescue Roberto. We really can’t abandon him like that, you know.”

  She let herself laugh. “What’s the story there, huh?” she asked, jabbing me in the ribs as we pushed open the door. “Something’s up, no?”

  But it wasn’t what either of us imagined: In the lounge, a very alert Roberto greeted us sitting up in the chair where we’d left him, nervously wringing his hands. Another man was sitting with him, broad-shouldered, his back to us. They were both watching the exodus from Cojímar, which continued to stream from TV screens everywhere.

  “Muchachas . . .” Roberto said, shooting out of his seat the instant he spotted us. He seemed to be waving us away but it was too late. The other man stood up, too, a handsome silver-haired gentleman in a crisp linen guayabera. As he turned to us with an almost embarrassed smile, Estrella gasped.

  “Ay dios,” she said, tears free flowing, her hands covering her face as she buried herself in the man’s shoulder.

  He kissed her as if she were a child, on her hair, her shoulders, all the while gently stroking her arms and back. “Mi negra, everything will be fine, and just as you want,” he said, his clear eyes reflecting the truth of his promise. “Let’s go home, okay?”

  The years, I noticed, had not diminished Johnny Suro’s charms, or his compassion.

  When I got back to Chicago, there was a message from Moisés in the voice of a Cuban operator on my answering machine. It was the very first time he had ever called me and, though it surprised me, I didn’t return the call right away.

  Instead I grabbed my mail and the pile of newspapers—all bannered with news about Cuba’s flood of rafters—and sat down before the TV, its sound a drone, its images all familiar now. I opened my bills one at a time and perused the math on each as if it mattered. I prepared for the worst, though I couldn’t fathom what that was, and dialed Havana. It took hours, then the line beeped, as it always does to signal an international call.

  Orlando answered. “¿Oigo?”

  “It’s Alejandra. Hello.”

  “Hello.”

  “Is Moisés there?”

  “Yes . . . just a minute . . .” There was din and confusion, the blur of Orlando’s hand trying to cover the phone. “He can’t come to the phone.”

  “I got a call from him, a message from an operator.”

  “No, that was me.”

  Silence.

  “Just a minute,” Orlando said.

  I could hear him conferring with Ester, who was saying, “Just tell her, just tell her.”

  “Is everything okay?” I called out.

  Orlando came back. “Yes, just a minute.” Then more hazy noises.

  “Orlando . . .” I said into the receiver. “Orlando!” I was yelling. I was imagining Moisés dead—that was the worst, yes.

  “Excuse me, Alejandra . . .” he said, embarrassed and apologetic. “It was my father-in-law who asked that I call but now he won’t come to the phone.”

  “What’s wrong?” I demanded.

  “Nothing’s wrong, we’re all fine,” Orlando insisted. “But Ernesto . . .”

  “What?” I loved Ernesto; after Moisés, I may have loved Ernesto most of all.

  “Well, Ernesto is on his way to the United States.”

  “¿Comó?” I was stunned.

  “Yes,” said Orlando, letting out a deep sigh. “He left yesterday from Cojímar. He has your phone number. But if you could check, you know . . . it would be helpful, a favor to all of us.”

  The waves from Cojímar brought about thirty thousand more Cubans to the United States, but Ernesto Menach wasn’t among them. I checked with the INS, with Cuban refugee organizations, with the Red Cross almost daily for a month. Nor was he among those forced into resettlement camps at Guantánamo or the Bahamas.

  “He went on a raft, with some friends,” Orlando told me. “He is wearing a T-shirt that says, ‘Cuba sí’. I don’t know if that helps. It’s a yellow raft, a real raft, the inflatable kind. They bought it from a British tourist. It was hidden here at the house for months; we didn’t know. We don’t know anything.”

  In November 1994, Cuba and the United States established direct-dial long-distance calling. On New Year’s Eve, the biggest holiday in Cuba, I called Moisés’s home and a man whose voice I didn’t recognize answered the phone. I considered I might have dialed wrong because he had a distinct Iberian accent. There was a great deal of noise behind him, as if there was a party going on.

  Then Orlando came to the phone.

  “Who was that?” I asked, perhaps jealous that an unknown foreigner might be making himself cozy in my Cuban home.

  “That was Francisco,” Orlando said dryly.

  “I don’t know him.”

  “No.”

  “Who is he?” I ventured.

  “He is Angela’s new husband,” said Orlando. “We are all saying farewell to them now, it’s a going away party. She is moving with him, to Spain.”

  For thou did cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas . . .

  Orlando and I were silent a long time, the static like boiling water. “Will you write to me?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said, and I knew he would.

  . . . and the flood was round about me; all thy waves and thy billows passed over me . . .

  “You are staying there?”

  “It’s my home,” he said. “My children live here. This is my family.”

  Th
e waters closed in over me, the deep was round about me . . .

  “I called to wish Moisés a good new year, and to give him my condolences for Ernesto,” I said.

  . . . weeds were wrapped around my head, at the roots of the mountains.

  “He won’t accept your condolences,” said Orlando. “He won’t sit shiva. Ernesto is not dead to him but like Jonah, in the belly of some great fish, just waiting to be vomited out.”

  Oh Lord . . .

  “Ale . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Tomorrow . . . happy birthday.”

  XXVIII

  Water has its own language.

  It talks, hums, ripples, and giggles through brooks and fountains while the wind plays on the clear skin of tidal pools, their treasures alive, busy, crawling. Water groans—the deep of the sea can pull back and hurl forth a fierce tsunami, unstoppable and orgasmic. It exalts, heals, and kills. Afterward, water sighs, retreats with a siren song.

  Havana is surrounded by water. The blue whispers from every corner—a severe blue, then a greenish blue, cobalt, azure, sky blue, sea blue. This is a blue, blue city, even the night has the plush density of blue velvet, the stars rain down in staccato, leaving a bluish sheen on the grimiest street, the most forgotten of stoops or doorways. The blue swivels, dips, disappears into rivers deep underground, gurgles, and purrs.

  There is no way to leave Cuba without traversing water, without paying it tribute with promises and prayers, without talking back to it. This is the island’s constant intercourse. Even the leap into U.S. territory at Guantánamo requires crossing a brackish moat.

  “Were you born in Cuba?”

  I’m inevitably asked this when I say I’m Cuban, as if my identity depended entirely on being birthed on the island, the fragile pouch of my mother’s water breaking, its flow rushing, returning to its own mysterious source and writing my name indelibly with indigo ink on the firmament.

  My passports—both of them—say I am Cuban: an American citizen but not American, Cuban, cubana, born in Cuba.