Days of Awe

by Achy Obejas

  He takes a turn, tosses me toward him, then shakes his head in amusement. In the backseat, Moisés rolls from side to side.

  “What’s so funny?” I ask, annoyed.

  “What a question!” he says. He’s grinning, as if I’ve just asked for the map to the fountain of youth.

  “It’s a real question,” I insist.

  “I’m sure,” he says. We pass my parents’ old apartment, which I note is green with mold and decay, boarded up as always. Downstairs, on the first floor of the same building, Celina’s rooms open to the world with sheer white curtains on the windows, their hems dancing on the sills and reminding me of her feathery dress ten years ago, the way her sun-kissed skin simmered underneath.

  “You’re not going to answer, are you?” I ask Orlando. I’m suddenly cranky, restless. I scan the area in front of my family’s old lodging, furtively surveying every window, every crack in every door for a glimpse of Celina, but I’m rewarded only with empty hallways, chipped walls, shadows.

  Orlando pulls up to their house, which is weathered and looks lopsided now, but I hardly notice. I’m now taking him in: his crooked nose, the creases around his sad brown eyes, the papery blue shade of his lids, the tight coils of silver on his head.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he says, sitting there in the hot, bright stillness of the afternoon. There’s not a peep from Moisés in the backseat, just a steady breathing. “Let me say this: I know what you saw and what it looks like,” Orlando continues. “I don’t think I can explain so you’ll understand. My wife and I . . . we were not really married.”

  “You’ve explained that part already,” I tell him.

  Orlando nods in embarrassment. “Yes, yes, but I know what’s going on in your head. “

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do, I do . . .”

  Orlando insists, though he can’t possibly know. I’m imagining that night on the road, the way I made his lip bleed as he reached into me. I’m gazing at his once elegant, satiny hands now cracked and swollen on the steering wheel.

  “I was lonely . . . it’s not an excuse. And she and I were friends and there were things she wanted me to teach her . . . I was older . . . and willing, very willing.”

  I can’t read him. I can’t tell if this is a confession or a statement of facts or perhaps even a clever, subversive sort of boast. “She was fourteen,” I finally say.

  “So was your great-grandmother Leah when she married Ytzak,” he says.

  “That was, like, a hundred years ago . . .”

  “Do you think they went through any more, or less, a hundred years ago than we have, here and now? Do you think—what?—they were more mature?”

  “Do you think that’s an excuse?”

  “I never slept with her, I observed limits.” This, finally, is his trump card, his final offer.

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why should I?”

  Then he smirks—I recognize the smirk—it’s the same one he gave Angela when she only brought him a half glass of milk.

  “Well, first,” he says, “because you need to . . .” He takes a breath, looks faraway, finally smiles (in an almost forced and inevitable surrender), then turns to me. Just like a decade ago, he’s lacking a sense of triumph at the most critical moment. Instead, his downcast eyes betray what is almost a plea. “And second,” he continues in a barely audible and melancholy whisper, “because you love me.”

  He uses the verb querer.

  XXX

  My father suffered his first heart attack in March of 1997. He was sitting at his desk in the basement, felt a jab in his chest, and hauled himself up the stairs, feeling every prickling inch of his huge mass, a thread of white froth following him until he dropped on my mother’s kitchen floor like a porpoise twitching on the shore.

  After that, my father began to spontaneously repeat lines from poems and books he’d translated. “Viento del Este: un farol y el puñal en el corazón,” he’d whisper to nothing and no one, not even glancing at his yellow legal pads. “East wind: a torch, a dagger in the heart.”

  He’d wince and touch his chest, then place his palms down as if already retired, simply waiting to be treated to a final manicure. In the heart attack’s aftermath, he seemed to constrict, so that suddenly he was not as tall or formidable. His shoulders slumped, his cheeks drooped and folded under his beard. In the shroud of light from his reading lamp next to the rocker, he appeared pious to the extreme, almost afraid. His hair, which had always been silky, was suddenly dry and brittle and his whiskers scratched when I kissed him.

  “It’s Cuba,” said my mother, fingering the bluish mole on her face.

  “Cuba?” I asked.

  Actually, I wasn’t surprised by her diagnosis—since the fall of the Berlin Wall years before, my mother had become engrossed in all things Cuban. She’d subscribed to various newspapers and news-letters from Miami-based exile groups, publications with screaming headlines about Communist infiltrations and Fidel’s certain demise. In each room in the house, including the bathroom, my mother had placed a short-wave radio tuned to different stations throughout the hemisphere just to keep track of events and rumors back on the island. In this way, the whole house was constantly buzzing; the only space safe from the static was the cool quiet of my father’s basement refuge.

  In the last few years, my mother had also bought a computer and learned enough about the Internet so she could participate in chat room and newsgroup discussions about the island. (Her screen name: MamaChola, the name for Ochún in palo monte; her password: aché, Yoruba for grace, a blessing.) Because of all this, she was able to anticipate Fidel’s announcement of the pope’s visit, the commercialization of Ché on the thirtieth anniversary of his death, and the first breathless broadcast from CNN’s brand-new bureau on the shores of Havana, as omnipotent and azure as ever. When Ernesto Menach disappeared, it was my mother I relied on for information and contacts about where to make inquiries.

  Curiously, in spite of all this my mother did not stake out a political position. She had one, of course, but more than anything else, she had questions. On the Internet, she’d lurk and listen, popping in only when something intrigued her. No matter how much she was baited, she knew to extricate herself from the endless diatribes, from the polemics and posturings that always accompany such debates. She’d submit her query—always about Fidel’s health, the weather on a particular day in Havana, the availability and price of certain items, and how things might be for people she cared about who had stayed behind—and then she’d sit back and wait.

  But while Cuba was clearly her mania—the Elegguá was now a proud cultural artifact, evidence of nationality as much as spirituality, resting openly in a corner of the living room—it had never been my father’s. As I well knew, for him Cuba was an endless dream, something he indulged in only for my mother, only as a part of his matrimonial promise.

  Still, my mother insisted: “He’s getting sicker, and it’s because of Cuba.”

  We both watched him, diminishing before our eyes, the books thicker and graver in his hands. When he’d look up to try and catch our eyes, there was something vulnerable and desolate there and we’d look away quickly, all of us embarrassed.

  She had a theory: “The problem with being born on an island,” she said, “is that you get used to gazing at the horizon. You develop a longing for whatever’s on the other side—the island always looks small and miserable compared to what you’ve imagined beyond. Then, one fine day, you leave the island, and you go out into the world and discover something terrible: You have not beaten the habit of looking at the horizon, of yearning for what’s invisible to you. And so you find yourself consumed with nostalgia.”

  As she spoke, my father stacked CDs for his new pastime, swaying back and forth in his chair with his eyes closed, listening to María Teresa Vera, Bola de Nieve, and the Vieja Trova Santiaguera.

  (Later, when I hear this
soft, often melancholy music again in Havana, it doesn’t recall an idyllic Cuba for me but, paradoxically, the cozy confines of my parents’ home in Rogers Park, my father rocking, a knitted afghan about his lap.)

  After his illness my father was slowed enough that he had to admit he couldn’t do his work. Medication robbed him of his sharpness, a sense of fragility kept him from engaging with authors in the robust dialogues that he had so enjoyed before.

  To my surprise, he didn’t insist on martyrdom, didn’t let pride exhort him to finish work that would ultimately be deemed mediocre, or at the very least, not his best. (My father loved to race himself, to hold up each subsequent job against the one just completed and measure the new distances his mind had traveled, the fresh meanings he’d extracted like rare gems from the deepest caves.)

  So when he realized he could barely keep his eyes open for more than a few hours at a time, when the yellow Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2s he preferred fell through his beautiful fingers and rolled on the desktop, he called and asked me to please finish a few projects already begun, particularly a prison novel by a young Cuban Genet named José Farraluque. My father did not choke when he called me, did not express regret or distaste but rather sighed, resigned, explaining that it was a difficult assignment to which he could trust no one else. He said he would be there by my side, the angel Gabriel, if I needed him.

  What astonished me most when my father asked me to complete the job for him, besides that he might actually delegate to me such an awesome responsibility, was the fact that Farraluque was not an exile flung to one of the far corners of the diaspora, but a Cuban sitting in Havana itself, bitching and moaning in his own way, but refusing to cross the blue borders of the Caribbean.

  “Did you know?” I asked.

  My father shrugged, the bones of his shoulders like the horizontal pole of a marionette.

  I combed Farraluque’s manuscript, stunned by the lurid sexuality and graphic violence my father had decided to tackle. It seemed a million miles from García Lorca’s precise lyrics and the dazzling labyrinths he’d traversed to bring someone like, say, Octavio Paz into an easy, almost conversational English.

  This was one of the great mysteries about my father’s genius: Most translators work best into, not from, their native language, using instinct to access the vernacular, the familiar. But my father did it both forward and backward, into and from his native Caribbean Spanish into a pure, songlike American tongue, as serious or cheeky as necessary, with a New England clip, the airy haze of southern California, or the wholesomeness of Wisconsin.

  There, among the notes for Farraluque’s racy story, were words I’d never heard my father pronounce in any language: for pinga in Spanish he offered dick, cock, man-sword, worm of death, shlong in English (or Yiddish, as was the case of the latter). Where in heaven’s name had he picked up this stuff ? I couldn’t fathom him skulking at the bus station or even glancing at the kind of pornography that would reveal these terms to him.

  “Papi,” I said laughing, “this is smut!” I’m not a prude, not at all above using these words myself in everyday conversation, but they seemed as unlikely out of my father’s mouth as big sticky bubbles of gum.

  “It’s literature,” he said, nodding, “brilliant, modern literature.”

  Even though he seemed to be joking, I knew he’d never have agreed to the project if he didn’t believe in it.

  “Shlong?” I said, holding up the page with his notes. “Where the heck did you learn shlong?”

  “I have secret lives, don’t you know that by now?” he said, using his toes to push himself back in the rocker, his lids trembling shut, a satisfied grin on his face.

  It was Pesaj (not that my parents acknowledged this in any way) when my mother heard the news on the radio that rocked her and my father that spring.

  The kitchen counter was a cornucopia of vegetables she intended to slice and chop for a hearty soup she hoped to present to my father. From her garden, the afternoon light shone through the windows, as resplendent as the breezy day blooming outside. While she cooked, my mother would gaze at her roses and the stiff-necked sunflowers stretching to the sky.

  On the airwaves, excited announcers had been prattling on about the palestinos, not the Palestinians from the Middle East but the country folk in Cuba who’d migrated to Havana and were now being forcibly returned to their small towns and destitute farms in the interior. A dizzying smell of garlic and cumin, onions and green peppers swirled from the stove.

  In the living room, my father rocked in his chair, his face pinned with a beatific smile as he listened to Ignacio Piñero: “Viandas, qué ricas son las viandas . . .” The singer rode on top of a soapy mix of rhythms, the backup vocalists a nasally bunch who looped their refrain around the naughty improvisations. Between his fingers, my father let burn a Cuban puro, its ashes sprinkling my mother’s floor.

  Though I lived apart from them, I was spending more and more time at their house, in part to help my mother take care of my father, but also because it made the Farraluque translation move faster with my father nearby. Since I preferred working on a computer to his method of pencil and paper, I had brought my laptop and set it up in the den, making that my office by default. I told myself it was easier for my father to pad his way around the first floor of the house; it took me a while to admit I was also overwhelmed by the idea of working at his desk, imagining myself filling up that immense and exacting throne.

  For the first night of Pesaj that year I was joining friends, as I always did, right in the neighborhood. One of the seder regulars—the freckled-face Latvian boy who’d spied my father davening in the basement years before—had married an Iranian Jewish woman who’d left Tehran only a few years ago and was still longing for her homeland, insisting that if she could, she’d return. It had spun us all into a whirl about exile, and we’d planned an evening of readings around that rather obvious topic to supplement our usual haggadah.

  For myself I had chosen (guilty, frustrated as always at my father’s refusal to confirm what I already knew to be true) a small snippet from Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps among the willows in the midst thereof. For they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. But how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

  Almost by accident, our group had become increasingly Sephardic over the years. Even though there were still some Askenazis among us—the Latvian boy, a few Poles—we’d been joined by the sons and daughters of refugees from Iraq and Yemen, exiles from Argentina and Brazil. Our texts reflected this, with the Hebrew pronounced slightly different from what our Askenazi friends used. The meal ignored gefilte fish and included rice, often with nuts and dates and other sweet things more reminiscent of Spain and the Middle East than the cool climes of Eastern Europe.

  I’d just finished taking a shower in my old bathroom—the air was foggy and damp and infused with the smell of violets—when I heard my mother’s voice downstairs.

  “Enrique, did you . . . did you hear?” she asked, her voice wavering. From her volume, I knew the exact distance from her to me and that she was standing at the door between the kitchen and the living room, wiping her hands nervously with a dish towel. And for reasons I’ve never understood, at that moment I felt my gut twist. I grabbed my robe and rushed downstairs, hitting the last step just as my father was turning to her, a slow motion pivot during which his eyes opened quizzically, brows arching.

  “Arturo Sandoval . . .” my mother said.

  “Arturo Sandoval?” I asked, surprised and confused. The former horn player with Irakere? What could he have done? Had he committed a terrible crime? Had he died? And if so, why would my mother be so muddled? My parents were not jazz fans, and Sandoval, to my knowledge, was neither a relative nor friend.

  “I heard it on the news . . .”

  �
��¿Qué, Mami, qué?”

  My father gazed at her. He had a kind of expectant halo about him, his thin frigate of bones tipped forward in the rocking chair, suspended in time.

  “He was refused citizenship,” said my mother, “American citizenship.”

  A black coarseness descended on my father’s face. For a moment, he looked like an injured bird, a crow fallen from the skies.

  “What?” I didn’t understand.

  She was flustered now. “They turned him down, Arturo, for U.S. citizenship,” she said again, pronouncing each part separately. “Remember how he played at the president’s inaugural?”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense,” I said, convinced she’d misunderstood the report. “Cubans are always welcome here, always.”

  “No, no,” my mother said, shaking her head, her hands wrapping themselves compulsively in and around the dish towel.

  The news was peculiar, harsh, but their traumatized reactions seemed out of proportion to me. My father was motionless, his hands gripping the sides of the rocking chair. He stared into an abyss only he could see. I thought back to when the Berlin Wall fell, how he’d looked stricken and lost.

  “Papi . . .” I said, brushing back the clumps of hair that had fallen on his forehead, casting dreadful shadows across his face. My mother continued nervously rolling the dish towel between her hands, the skin red on her fingers.

  “He’s a man without a country,” my father whispered through dry, tender lips.

  “I’m sure there’s been some sort of mistake,” I said.

  They both shook their heads, surrendering to a terrible inevitability only they seemed to understand.

  “This always happens to me,” my father sighed, tears welling. His lashes were shiny and wet, dangling tiny diamonds from each lush tip.

  “What? What always happens to you?” I asked, disconcerted, wondering what mystical message they were deriving from what I was sure was just a bureaucratic snafu with Sandoval.

  “This, this,” he said, as cryptically as ever, waving his hand like I imagined old man Olinsky had done at him so many years ago.