Days of Awe

by Achy Obejas

  This is the part that never changes.

  I can be, of my own free will, a woman or a man, an engineer or a chef. I can live anywhere, declare whatever allegiances I want. I can love anyone anytime in any way that I choose, and it changes nothing about that fixed moment in time: The first of January 1959, and my first gasp of air outside the womb, in Havana.

  This is what’s both inevitable and inscrutable: That moment of first light, Cuban copen, one in the afternoon, the waters already arguing among themselves, and dividing, blue and red and black.

  At Moisés’s house in 1987, one of his lingering neighbors, in a gesture without any ill intent, asked me casually when I’d left Cuba.

  “She didn’t leave!” Moisés bellowed from the kitchen. He came rushing out, a brown-edged plastic spatula in his hand, sprinkling grains of yellow rice in the air. “They took her! She was just a child, she had no say. ¡Se la llevaron!”

  I was bundled up, I was precious cargo.

  “You were saved,” whispered the same neighbor as soon as Moisés ducked back in the kitchen. “When you get back to the U.S., my god, tell your parents how grateful you are.”

  Ernesto laughed.

  “No, really, Ernestico,” the neighbor insisted, one eye on the kitchen door in case Moisés should leap back in the room to a swashbuckling defense of his revolution.

  A grinning Ernesto just shook his head. “You realize what the real lesson is here, don’t you, Alejandra?”

  “What’s that?” I asked, poised coolly against the stairs to the barbacoa. I knew everyone was watching me.

  “You are absolved, my friend, you may live guilt-free among the bourgeoisie, the enemy, because you had no say in your predicament,” he said. “You can come back and we will help you cry about your lost, lost Cuba because none of this is your fault. It may be ours, perhaps, or the kidnappers—except that would be your parents and it’s complicated then—but not yours, not ever. ¡Te llevaron! Now remember that. It’s a story you will need. And it will be even more convincing if you believe it.”

  One day, on that first trip to Cuba, a man followed me out of the Habana Libre all the way to the university, where I was working a series of meetings. At the time, I thought nothing of it. I figured he was another one of those guys who hung around the hotels clandestinely, hoping to get a foreigner to buy something for them at the diplo-tienda or take a letter to the United States or maybe just engage in some conversation and get a free meal or sex with a natural blonde (a Swedish tourist perhaps, or an East German).

  But when I saw him again during the lunch break, leaning against the wall and nervously smoking a cigarette, I began to worry. At the end of the workday, he was still there. I considered my parents might have been right: that I was being followed, manipulated, spied upon. When I stepped off campus, I could feel him behind me, a jittery shadow.

  Out on the street, I shifted gears and turned, then turned again, snaking through the busy sidewalks jammed in late afternoon with old women carrying bags of goods, young men idling in packs like eager puppies, couples in transit, bloated antique cars and honking buses on the thoroughfare.

  Whenever I paused to see if he was still there, the man would shift, too—he had a swimmer’s build, lean but strong, with a kind of curve to his shoulders. Whenever I spotted him, he would screech to a halt and pretend to be waiting for the bus, or suddenly lean into the window of a car at a traffic stop and ask for a light.

  I finally led him out of the labyrinth, past the stifling crowds whose sweat seemed to stick to my body like smoke, out to the open air of the Malecón. The blue beckoned, breathed a promise of relief.

  I didn’t look back. I knew he was there, behind me, strutting probably, preparing a fantastic line or an indictment. I could almost see him, slowly swaggering across the street to the seawall, mission accomplished, victory in a long drag on his cigarette.

  But when I finally turned to face him up close, my stalker was all nerves and shakes. He had a day-old beard and a web of tiny lines like scars around his coal-fired eyes. His shirt was worn, with loose threads at the seams.

  “Señorita,” he said anxiously, looking in all directions before finishing his sentence, “will you marry me?”

  “¿Qué qué?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard right; the sea behind us, with its constant agitation, must have altered his voice.

  “Oh, no, not like that!” he exclaimed, even more horrified at my reaction than I was at his proposal. “No, look, you’re a foreigner, right? Where are you from? Canada? Look, my girlfriend is in Canada and I can’t get a visa. I’ll do anything, I’ll pay you whatever you need—I can work, I can get the money once I’m there, I swear—just marry me, please. Get me out of here.”

  When I return to Cuba for the second time in 1997, I have Orlando— who now drives a carefully preserved 1985 blue Moskvitch with which he earns a living chauffeuring tourists—take me to Varadero to see Barbarita, my mother’s cousin.

  Ten years after my first trip to Cuba, my mother wants to know everything about what’s happening on the island, to hear from old friends, even visit. With me, she sends Barbarita one thousand U.S. dollars, which I have carefully stowed in a money belt strapped under my shirt and across my chest. The cash is meant to help her with repairs to the house, necessary after the last hurricane tore her roof, and for day-to-day survival.

  Technically, Varadero is part of Cuba, just about an hour or so outside of Havana. The highways there follow the northern coasts, where empty snack stands offer false enticements, and huge cranes like pterodactyls peck at the shore for oil. All along, the greenery on the south side is thick with pines and palms, hills sloping into the mists.

  But, in fact, while it may be found on the island, Varadero exists through a space portal into another dimension. It’s Cuba but a kind of neofuturist Cuba, hysterical and hallucinatory. Everything in Varadero seems new and has a price tag, everything in Varadero feels urgent and expendable.

  The hotels loom like Atlantis, effulgent and alien, one after the other, rising out of the raw shore. They are all painted in inoffensive Euro-friendly pastels, with tiled roofs and tinted windows, real (and ghastly) hamburgers on the menus, and working air-conditioning. There are no pesos anywhere; in fact, clerks sniff at the national currency as if it were Monopoly money. There’s a golf course, with perfectly manicured sod, reserved for the exclusive use of Italians and Spaniards who want to teach mellow mulato girls how to play. “Fore!” they say, and laugh while drinking their mojitos.

  There are no blackouts here, the roads are smooth, the telephones always work. The discos—and there are plenty—play Madonna and Gloria Estefán without apologies. When the floor shows come to life, the dancers are always black as night, with hard round buttocks, wild plumes, and overly ripe breasts that vibrate in accompaniment to hand drums and congas. The girls are all beautiful, witty but sweet, and so easy to talk to . . . Here, even the street signs speak English: “mini-market,” says one; “USD only,” says another.

  Because she is Cuban, Barbarita lives in the underbelly of Varadero, with the rest of the natives. These are the neighborhoods to the sides, away from the main avenues, the lights and the hustle. These are the places that never appear on postcards and tourist brochures.

  Here an occasional hen, skinny and riddled with some sort of blue mold on its feathers, rests comfortably on the front stoop of a weathered, gray, clapboard house, its shutterless windows open to a kitchen with a snoring old man on a cot next to the stove, his middle-aged daughter fixed to a rocking chair, her hands folded as if in prayer, just like Rodolfo back at Moisés’s, static before the TV set.

  There are domino games under the shade of massive ceibas, the men slapping the pieces on a flat scrap of wood resting on their bent knees, a kind of human-held table. Cigar smoke whirls, children with dirty faces run across the dusty road, mischievously pull the laundry from the line, and ask anybody they think is a lost tourist for money.

  When we get ne
ar Barbarita’s street, neither Orlando nor I can figure out the exact address on the letter she sent my mother. Finally, Orlando parks the car. “Who are you looking for?” asks an old black woman across the way. She’s large, bubbling almost, and as she makes her way to us her whole body seems to percolate. She talks to Orlando because she thinks I’m a tourist and don’t understand. “I’ve lived here all my life; I know everybody,” she says, offering her credentials.

  “We’re looking for Barbarita Abravanel,” I say in perfect Cuban Spanish, all attitude and style, although here in this hovel in the shadows of Varadero, where the ocean’s misty perfume can’t mask the stink from the nearby hotels’ garbage dumps, nothing will shroud my privilege either.

  “¿La china?” she asks, surprised but unembarrassed about looking me over from head to toe, her upraised eyebrow indicating her continuing doubts.

  I nod, which catches Orlando by surprise. He knows nothing about my mother’s side of the family.

  “I’m Alejandra San José. She’s my aunt,” I say, using another kind of license—the Cuban custom of rearranging and renaming relatives and others we love according to need, not bloodlines.

  The old woman grins. Her eyes turn from dead dirt brown to a warm, swirling chocolate. “You’re Nena’s daughter?”

  I nod again.

  She points the way, down a path that seems hardly there—even at high noon, it’s murky, covered with a thick canopy of vines and branches. Orlando takes my hand and reluctantly leads the way, pushing the strings of what appear to be kudzu from our faces.

  In ten years, he has changed dramatically. His hair has a patina of slate to it, its roots still remarkably black, but all his running around in the sun with tourists has given his skin a browner varnish. His hands, which were once as delicate as satin, are now calloused and rough from so much driving, maneuvering steering wheels that feel like they’re on fire, and carrying luggage in and out of hotels. His palms are distinctly outlined in copper and faded yellow. He is slimmer, too, not muscular, but conscious of his weight and looks in a tender way. He is fifty years old now, the age at which men become aware of death, and everything about him is vulnerable.

  When we arrive at Barbarita’s we know it’s her house because there’s nothing else, only brambles and bush. It is a large home, long like a train; we see it disappear back into the wilderness. The last hurricane not only tore the roof but the walls, too, opening the front room completely to the skies and the elements. Amazingly, the front door is intact—its frame a hard mahogany, with roses carved into its face, a knocker, and a doorbell with tricolor wires like the Cuban flag that leak out and down, along the exposed and weathered blue-and-white living room tiles. The door and the frame hang as if suspended in the air.

  “Oh my god.” It’s Orlando. Even he’s a bit shocked.

  Beyond the door are two rockers, their termite-eaten arms practically disintegrating before our eyes. On the floor are worn strips from other, long ago chairs, the more preserved blue tiles where a table or wardrobe might have once been.

  We look at each other, confused. Do we ring the bell? Knock? Do we dare pass through the door to the other side, where another door installed on a wall to the rest of the house waits?

  “What the hell,” I say, in English, and ring the bell. I feel a surge in my fingers and a buzz echoes from the house. Nothing happens.

  “I’ll wait here,” Orlando says. “Why don’t you try that other door?” He points past the vast emptiness of the floor tiles.

  In a gesture to the fact of the door, I turn the knob, step inside, though I could just as easily have gone around it. As I walk across the naked living room, I feel like a thief, a trespasser, and I call Barbarita’s name. There is no sound, though, except the briny breeze ruffling the trees just beyond the borders of the house, the ocean’s faraway roll, and the hum of traffic in the distance. I knock on the second door, the one that’s attached to a wall that threatens to crumble at my touch. But there’s no answer again. I look back at Orlando. He waves me on.

  “Buenas,” I say to the penumbra inside. My eyes need a second to adjust, but my nose takes in the dust and mildew. There is furniture stacked to the ceiling, I can see its outlines. It leaves only a thin passage of light to a patio just beyond, where the sun illuminates a clothesline, a stack of wood, and what appear to be hundreds of glass bottles.

  “Sí?” says a tiny spectral figure with extraordinarily long arms, a little prune of a woman whose tone betrays fear at the sight of me. She steps into the center of the patio and walks tentatively toward me, her shoulders back.

  “Barbarita . . . Barbarita Abravanel?” I say.

  “I’m Barbarita Abravanel,” she says, and her face, which has been in the dark until now, comes into focus: an elegant face, round, with high, fat cheeks and little gleaming almonds for eyes, someone not Chinese by birth but perhaps by osmosis.

  “I’m Alejandra,” I say, but she doesn’t recognize me.

  Her small, moist mouth starts to form my name, to repeat it, but because I know it will end with an ellipsis and a question mark, I anticipate her—I can’t bear the idea that she doesn’t know me.

  “Nena’s daughter,” I add, and whatever it was inside her that was ready to confront me, to defend herself before the intruder she thought I was, collapses, her long arms trembling as they close around my neck. She is so small, I have to bend from the waist to hold her. She makes little chirping sounds in my ear, giggles and kisses every part of me that’s exposed.

  In the afternoon that Orlando and I spend with Barbarita, we are entertained by about a half dozen other elderly women, all of whom come in and out of her kitchen with ease and familiarity. We are served pumpkin soup, fried chicken, and regaled with hilarious stories about how the chicken came to the table, and how the hurricane stole the living room, and the absurd things that happen on the buses to and from Havana. I notice Barbarita has little buddhas everywhere in the house, rosebushes in the back.

  On our return to the city, I’m exhausted and settle into the passenger’s seat, toss off my sandals and sigh. “They’re not so bad,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Their lives—I mean, I get it, there are ways in which they are cursed: by the scarcities, the poverty, the limits of their mobility, but they’re old now, too, so maybe that’s less important,” I say as the wind whips in the windows. “And yet, still, there is something oddly paradisiacal about their existence.”

  “Are you crazy?” asks Orlando.

  “No, really, even the house, with its front room blown away, it’s really quite comfortable, quite large, it’s kind of amazing that it’s all still there,” I say. “In the States, that would never happen, you know, it would have been picked apart by looters, somebody would have killed her by now. I mean, she’s surrounded by friends and people who love her, she’s taken care of.”

  “Don’t romanticize this, Alejandra—you’d never live here,” he says, his eyes intent, almost angry, as he looks past the windshield. “Not like us, not ever. If your parents hadn’t taken you, you’d have left on your own.” The muscles on his arms twitch, his brow darkens.

  “Please . . .” I say, reaching to him over the vast gulf, kissing his shoulder, “don’t hate me so much.”

  “The problem,” he says, still annoyed but less so, “is that you think you’ve missed something.”

  “I did,” I say. “I know I did.”

  I’m not an expert swimmer.

  My blue-veined strokes are asymmetrical, often messy. My feet kick as if I were resisting being dragged somewhere, as if I were always trying to escape from my captors, to go back rather than advance.

  When I’m submerged completely, moving as if in slow motion in all that gloom, I am always aware of the water talking. It’s a low, low sound, like a moan, a rolling tenor from somewhere deep, horrible and dazzling. It trills in my chest, my throat. It’s the last sound we make with our mouths wide open—it’s a longing to belong.
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br />   In the water, I turn over, my face to the surface. The colors burn, flicker, just beyond the skin of the sea. Without moving a muscle, the blue washes away and my body rises to the whitest, most lucid light. When I emerge, slick like a newborn, my first sighting is always, always Cuba.

  XXIX

  In March of 1995, I was spending all my time at Illinois Masonic Hospital, watching over Leni, who’d managed to shatter her body in a sensational car accident that killed an Uruguayan doctoral student in economics at the University of Chicago. An angry, whiskey-fueled Leni had plowed head-on into his midget Italian sports car on Lake Shore Drive, tossing him over the embankment and into the tumultuous and icy lake. It took divers several days to recover the boy’s body, by which time his family—including his father, a former colonel who had participated in some of the army’s less decorous activities during the country’s bleak years—had arrived, threatening a lawsuit, then a bloody revenge, then crumbling.

  I found out about the accident not because I’d been called as Leni’s emergency contact person, but because the distinguished Uruguayans needed an interpreter. It wasn’t until we were right smack in the gleaming hallways of Illinois Masonic, after I’d heard the dreadful story from the grieving parents who were themselves in need of medical care because of the trauma, that I was handed a copy of the police report and almost choked when I saw Leni’s name.

  I ran to her room only to find her bandaged and blind, hooked up as if to the thousand albuminous tentacles of a giant jellyfish, lying there in the bluish light of the hospital. I approached her as if she were an extraterrestrial on view in a laboratory, not recognizing anything as familiar, but with my heart pounding as if I, too, were possessed by an alien creature trying desperately to escape from my throat and chest.

  “Leni . . .” I touched her hand, all purple and bloated, her wrist bracelet-free and riddled with scratches and cuts. Leni just lay there, breathing through a clear plastic tube that ran in a tangle among all the others, as peaceful as I’d ever seen her.