by Achy Obejas
When she finally awoke, days later, she remembered nothing but having an argument with her new girlfriend, going off in a huff to hear a jazz singer on the South Side, and coming home happy because she’d scored a phone number from the pianist, a girl as stately as a Nubian princess. When the visiting police officers told her what had transpired, Leni blinked and said nothing. Later, when we were alone and she was able to take the tube out of her mouth for a bit, she began to mutter that it was an accident, that it wasn’t like she was trying to kill him.
“And, you know, one less little fascist Friedman economist won’t exactly hurt your part of the world . . .” she said, sarcastic and hurt and unable to grasp exactly what had happened.
If someone had foreseen and warned me about Leni’s accident, I would have imagined myself devotedly back at her side in a flash, taking care of her, trying at whatever cost to salvage her limbs and spirit and maybe some hope for us. But though I went to see her nightly during her weeks in the hospital, and even took on the task of accompanying her to physical therapy and court once she was released, I was pulled from Leni’s vortex by the most unimaginable of champions: Orlando.
His letters began arriving the very day of her hospitalization, like Moisés’s, in those gossamer blue envelopes. But unlike Moisés’s long, eloquent epistles, Orlando’s were more like notes, quick scribbles, always written on scrap paper while sitting in his car or at a cafeteria or bar waiting for somebody. Sometimes I swore I could smell the sea, or coffee, or stale beer on them; other times I was convinced there were spicy traces of cologne.
Because Orlando insisted out of some weird pride on mailing the letters through regular post—in spite of his easy access to scores of foreigners—they took weeks, sometimes months to arrive. When they landed in my box, they’d come out of order, sometimes in bunches. He’d often repeat himself, telling me the same story two or three times, unsure whether the previous letter had made it, or whether he’d already told me. The versions were often slightly different, sometimes informed by some critical new detail, other times just abbreviated accounts.
That first note he sent was about the longest I ever received, a full page, his script in awkward blocks, and to my amazement, full of grammatical errors. Everything suggested he was rushed: Instead of Alejandra, it was just “A”; instead of que, just “q.” He wrote in pencil, on paper that he’d obviously carried around bunched up in his pocket, and the lead had gotten shiny and soft, arriving in Chicago as faded and mysterious as the cave drawings at Lauscaux.
“My wife is not my wife,” he wrote. “She is someone else’s wife. She was always someone else’s wife except we didn’t know who he was. She’s my sister, really, and we lived in our father’s house. I know you thought she was my wife—everyone did—even we did—we were confused—everyone was confused—I think everyone might still be confused—but she is not my wife. Yes, it’s true, we were married for years, and there are even pictures to prove it, not just of the wedding but of us—husband and wife, you can see it in our faces— but it was more something we were trying to be. We love each other, certainly—that is not in doubt—but a few years back—when no one was looking—we talked it through and got a divorce. We didn’t tell anybody. Why would we tell anybody? Nothing changed, except we changed, but maybe not. I think we knew all along.”
Over time there were literally hundreds of notes, some of them with a list of activities: “Today: Take Rafa to the hospital, take my father-in-law to temple, fix shoes.” Other times, quick sketches: “Went by the piquera near Central Park. I was walking around, checking the car. A man came over to me and without prompting started telling me my future. It’s too horrible to tell you.” Or, “Deborah has won a prize for one of her sculptures (it was made of mud and none of us understood it, but everyone at the state art council says it is brilliant). In the meantime, Yosemí has taken to hanging around the cathedral plaza, singing with a group of young people who all seem too earnest. She came home wearing a crucifix around her neck. No one has said anything. My father-in-law stares at it with his good eye—which is not so good anymore. We say nothing—no one here ever says anything.”
Orlando’s feverish pitches kept me awake—I knew something was stirring inside me, something ancient and wistful. I’d write back immediately, short letters like his but loaded with questions and doubts, sometimes two or three or four messages a day, whenever I got inspired, that were often more like journal entries, conversations with my own confused self about everything from the most mundane and sappy song lyric to the importance of rain and my father’s obsessions with heaven.
I had never, ever, talked with anyone about these things, never confessed these tiny torments directly to another soul, and I would find myself exhilarated with our exchanges one day, terrified the next.
Leni’s accident cost her not just a degree of motor skills but her lover at the time, who couldn’t endure the antiseptic medical center or the tediousness of physical therapy and left her while she was still held together by wires in her hospital bed.
I stuck around, not because I’m any more decent, but because I wanted to be perceived that way. We were well beyond the possibility of jealousy or reconciliation, but onto some other plane where we acknowledged the inevitability of our intimacy but no longer found desire between us convincing or worthwhile.
“Get out of here! Get out of here!” Leni screamed red-faced when I came through the door one day at the hospital.
I got only a glimpse of her: rolled on her side, the hospital gown damp and twisted about her like a straitjacket, her white arms still stuck with tubes, and the wires suspended above her. Behind her, a nurse bent between her legs, parting the half moons of her slender bottom with gloved hands and wiping at something that exhumed a dreadful stench.
“Get the fuck out of here!” Leni shrieked, crying, her lips swollen.
She managed to somehow upset the night table, sending a lamp and the phone smashing to the floor. A small box of juice with a straw sticking out of it tumbled to my feet. I stepped back, practically pushed out by the strength of her will. I stood outside her hospital door, flat against the wall, listening to my own heart and Leni sobbing, berating the nurse all the while.
I tried to imagine Leni needing help but just as I was conjuring her leaning on my arm to get in and out of the bathtub, or maybe rolling into bed at night, the image of her in my head would leap up, absolutely defiant, and throw javelins, lift two-ton trucks, and run.
Yet knowing that in real life Leni would soon be propped up on a bar stool making wisecracks during salsa night at some dance club made all my conclusions too benign. I realized how easy it had been for me all along, because we didn’t have any expectations, to come to the hospital bearing flowers and smiles, knowing at night I’d be in my own bed, certain of both its solitude and abundance.
Maybe, I thought, Leni’s treasonous lover, with her brutal, immaculate honesty, had done the right thing after all. In her place, I might have thought twice, too, about how we could fit together, if there might not be new, endless cavities in Leni’s body in which I might just drown from pain and eventual regret.
Years ago, when I was a kid, the women in my family—my aunt, all my cousins, and I (my mother refused to participate, skipping the beach altogether)—would sit on the shore in Miami Beach during vacations and comment derisively about the elderly Jewish women who wore two-piece bathing suits and swam a mile or two every day. Their skins would sag along the elbows and knees, collecting freckles and dark patches on their shoulders and backs. This, I imagined years later, is what Leni would look like when she retired, how she would spend her time away from me.
“¡Qué ridículas!” my tía Gladys would say about the Jewish women, forgetting her mother-in-law and her own daughters’ destinies. (I always imagined there was a twisted jealousy to all this, as if she knew they were the women Mike Kauf would have been with if fate hadn’t intervened and introduced her to him.)
We’
d spread out on lounge chairs and beach towels, all copious thighs and generous bellies, and watch the Jewish women stroking the water. We’d pretend to pity them, preferring to think they were abandoned by heartless families back in New York and Arizona instead of so obviously independent.
I’d join the fun, too, but after everyone had lost interest, I’d still be watching the Jewish women, their strong feet kicking up white foam as they neared the horizon. Their powerful arms arched flawlessly over the water, cutting through the air like strategic missiles.
“Tell me you love me,” Leni whispered to me one morning during her recovery as I helped her from the bed to the bathroom. She was back at her own place by then. Her arms sort of flopped around my neck. “Tell me you still love me, at least a little.”
I kissed her cheek and hauled her up on her feet. “I love you,” I said. Her girlfriend was gone, every bit of her obliterated from Leni’s apartment. It was like the Russians in Cuba, erased without a trace.
“Okay,” she said as we shuffled together down the hall to the bathroom, “now tell me in Spanish, for old times’ sake.”
“Te quiero,” I said, smiling, because it was true still.
Leni pulled away. “That’s not how you used to say it,” she said, not with her usual sarcasm, but with her voice hushed and small, sore like her wounds.
“Sure I did,” I said, plopping her down on the toilet. Her left leg jutted out, unable to bend, the pins a gift from Dr. Frankenstein.
“No, I remember: te amo,” she said, her balance uneasy. I immediately wondered if she might be abusing any one of her many medications.
“It’s te quiero now.”
“What? Your Spanish Language Royal Dickhead Academy eliminated te amo?”
This is the beauty of Leni: At any given time, she retains just enough detail about what’s important to make you feel like she’s really listening.
“No, no, but you and I . . . you know, we’re just te quiero, it was always te quiero underneath, that’s why it works, that’s why I’m here,” I said.
Leni guffawed. “Oh please,” she said. “You’re here ’cause, let’s face it, there’s some sick kick in seeing me not so cute anymore. I bet you think if this had happened earlier, there wouldn’t have been so many others, so much damage to us.” She took a breath. “Aw, hell, you’re all fucked up, you don’t know what you want. . . .”
She didn’t just mean me, but us—Latinos, probably cubanos in particular.
It’s not just a prejudice on her part, although I wouldn’t be surprised if Leni’s bitterness had turned that way without her realizing it. What she meant was that we have a twisted way of expressing love: Te quiero, from the verb querer, doesn’t mean love at all, but desire. Querer is to want, to yearn for.
But here’s the madness: Querer is quotidian, what you say to parents and friends, cousins and children. Querer is love designed strictly for living things. You can’t querer a movie the way you can love a film in English, you can’t querer arroz con pollo or a bicycle or a particular and comfortable old pair of shoes (although, just to be confusing, you can querer arroz con pollo in the sense that you can have a taste for it and want some). Querer always implies an imperfect and human bond. Combine querer with any number of other words and its latent urgency shines through: como quiera, anyhow; cuando quiera, anytime; donde quiera, anywhere.
Amar is so much more precise: love, romantic love. It’s the stuff of both the most lyrical poetry and the tackiest soap opera, making it virtually impossible—especially among Cubans, I think—to say with a straight face. Te amo practically requires that you recite a quick verse by Federico García Lorca and cut your veins. I said it to Leni in moments of complete adoration but more likely because there were no knowledgeable witnesses, no one to make me follow through on its real and complete usage.
“Te amo is so cold, don’t you think?” my father once asked when we were discussing this very subject.
“Cold?” I was stunned. This was, I’d always thought, the most wildly intense and amorous thing you could say to a lover. How could that be cold?
“Well, it’s so formal, so sharp, “ he said, embarrassed. “It’s nothing you could say to someone with whom you’re ticklish or playful . . . I mean . . .”
“Don’t you say it to Mami?”
“Oh my god no,” he said, chortling. “She’d never take me seriously again!”
Like querer, you can’t really amar a thing either; it’s generally reserved for person-to-person application. In fact, you really can’t love inanimate objects in Spanish; it’s an emotion for warm bodies, sentient beings. A cat maybe, a parrot, perhaps a car if it’s been anthropomorphed enough.
In Spanish, if you like something very, very much, if you love it the way you might love books or flowers in English, you are then enchanted by them (me encantan) or you like them (me gustan) and you use tone and context to convey your deep, deep affection that’s awfully close to but never quite love.
But gustar is tricky, too. It’s versatile, good for both people and things. But while you can gustar trains and postage stamps and music by Arsenio Rodríguez, you have to be careful when it applies to individuals. That’s because gustar, like querer, is chock-full of lust. In other words, while you can gustar your lifeless leather jacket and no one will necessarily think you kinky, the minute that you gustar your mother-in-law, as opposed to just liking her, you have crossed all lines of propriety.
The safest thing to do in Spanish, it turns out, is to always be encantada—enchanted—perpetually caught in some kind of spell or trance, this way your actions are not necessarily entirely your own.
When I return to Cuba in 1997, Moisés and Orlando pick me up at the airport, which is as airless and hot as ever, except now it is full of happy Canadian and Spanish businessmen (no women) chattering on their cell phones. Although Havana has been rocked by a series of bombings—as many as ten explosions and at least one dead Italian tourist—there’s a party atmosphere the whole way through customs, with the soldiers from the Ministry of the Interior now playing second fiddle to the young, blue-blazered hosts from Havanatur and the other agencies that facilitate the bureaucracy for foreigners. New TV monitors on the walls loop scenes from Cuban variety shows featuring salsa bands that play to American tastes.
On the way to their home—I couldn’t fathom staying at a hotel this time—all Moisés can talk about is how the Florida Marlins will surely win the upcoming World Series because their pitcher, the young Liván Hernández, is a Cuban trained by the revolution. I understand it’s a way to avoid more troubling topics so I just go along with him.
“But is it true what they say,” I ask, “that his older brother, El Duque, is much better?”
“Oh yes, oh yes,” gushes Moisés as Orlando looks on via the rearview mirror. He’s driving. I’m sitting up front on the passenger side, half turned to talk to the old man, who leans forward, his chin on the back of my seat.
“Not that it matters,” mutters Orlando. When I arrived, we kissed and hugged each other but awkwardly; it’s as if we know one another too well yet not at all—both at once—as if we’d seen each other naked by accident.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
Moisés suddenly leans back in his seat.
“Oh, he doesn’t like to talk about it,” says Orlando, nodding at Moisés in the mirror. “It doesn’t matter how good El Duque is because the government won’t let him play, that’s why. And even my father-in-law has a hard time explaining that.”
Moisés looks at me, shrugs, and closes his eyes. He drops his chin on his chest like a petulant child. For the rest of the ride, it’s impossible to tell if he’s asleep or just pretending.
“No es fácil,” says Orlando, resigned.
As we drive into the city I recognize the road as the place where Orlando and I pulled over. Although this is a sunny, sleepy afternoon, the highway doesn’t look significantly different from ten years ago. There are thickets of palms,
prickly green and yellowing bushes along the sides, clouds of mosquitos and massive blue flies visible even from the speeding car. The remains of an unlucky cane rat lie flat and bloody across the pavement.
Along the way, the houses are gray, grayer still, the wooden boards slicker, but—with the exception of a huge, almost ridiculous Benetton ad—the billboards boast revolutionary slogans just like before: “En Cuba, no habrá gobierno de transición.” A huge, ocher-colored truck in front of us pulls a trailer with a hump; it’s filled with people wearing the same cool, impertinent faces as a decade ago. Orlando passes it with a quick swerve.
“Tell me about Celina,” I say.
He’s a little startled. “She’s doing well,” he says, unsteadily.
“Still friends?” I ask, but I’m looking out, away from him. There are loose dogs, breathlessly watching from the dried patches of grass along the way. They stare at us, as if remembering a time when they chased cars with impunity. From a long line of black figures on the horizon, there’s a constant, hollow barking.
“Still friends,” he says, nodding for emphasis. He looks at me expectantly, raises his brow.
“Just friends?”
“Ah,” he says, nodding more assertively, suddenly understanding my meaning. “I forgot that you knew . . . she told me. Yes, just friends. We were always just friends.” He glances at the backseat, either to check on Moisés or out of paranoia. The old man’s bowed head bounces along with the bumps in the road.
“She told you what?”
“You saw . . . right?”
“Right.” We’re silent for a bit. “You loved her, no?” (I’m using querer.)
“Always, still do. She is very special. To you, too, I think.”
I’m a bit taken aback. “I don’t even know her, Orlando,” I say.
“Yes, well . . .”
“But did you love her?” I persist. (Now I’m using amar.)
Orlando laughs. “You mean, was I in love with her? Is that what you’re asking me?”