by Achy Obejas
“It is not the priest’s fault your father died,” my tía Gladys told me. “It’s as if your mother is blaming him, and it’s not his fault. It’s god’s will!”
At the service, my mother tried to blend in to the front-row blackness, a lump of human flesh, pressing mourners’ outstretched hands between her own palms. With each expression of grief, she retreated further and further. Almost as soon as we had begun, my mother had taken on a kind of glassy, faraway look, a mask that anyone who knew and loved her understood to be a projection of her inexhaustible pain.
All the while, my tía Gladys hung next to her, moaning as if it was she who was widowed, while a patient Mrs. Choy took up the other side, gently guiding friends and relatives. I was on the other side of my aunt, who would occasionally thump my back during her anguished throes or impatiently point and push me toward whoever was offering condolences. When a now thin-haired Seth showed up, it was Mrs. Choy who helped my mother stand up and accept his sympathies. He had to practically bat my aunt away to get to me, she was so busy crying into his neck.
“How are you holding up?” asked Seth.
“Okay,” I lied. In spite of his genuine feelings for my father (and me), I knew it was too much to expect Seth to comfort me beyond his simple presence.
He nodded. “Good, good,” he said, relieved. “If you need anything, let me know.” But I knew better: Seth would be who I’d dial up in winter, when I didn’t want to talk, but needed somebody to get me out of the house—to the movies, a lecture at Columbia College, a midnight show with some bluesy crooner at the Green Mill. He touched my elbow, just like old times, before he went and took a seat in one of the back pews, unobtrusive and safe.
“Nice mourners,” said Leni, who’d flown in from her New York home for the occasion. Leni hadn’t said anything when she arrived at my apartment earlier that day, just wrapped me up in her arms and wept with me, her bracelets sturdy and still. Now she eyed the black bundles at the front of the chapel. “I hear in parts of Asia some women make a living hiring out as professional mourners. Maybe a little vocational training could be useful here.”
“Nah,” I said, smiling in spite of everything, “they’re not loud enough. I think one of the qualifiers for hired mourners is that you have to be able to wail on command. These women will only wail if it looks unintentional, as if they’re just having a natural—”
“—exaggerated—”
“—well, yes, natural but somehow exaggerated response,” I said as we both suppressed our indecorous laughter.
“I promise,” Leni said, seriously and out of nowhere, “to be there for you, no matter what.”
I watched as she moved gingerly across the muted carpet of the chapel, her bracelets jingling now as she offered condolences in her Berlitz Spanish to all my relatives. They jumped up when they saw her, surprised but delighted, even in their sadness. Because Leni walks with a slight limp, they took her hand for balance, hoping to steady her, and perhaps themselves, too.
Although we had pleaded with friends not to send flowers but to contribute to charity instead (a literacy program administered through Loyola), the blossoms piled up anyway—giant wreaths, bewildering arrangements two and three feet tall with notes from my father’s writer friends, sent from Spain and Italy, Venezuela and Mexico.
To everyone’s amazement, José Farraluque, the erotica writer from Cuba, relayed a long, surprisingly touching letter accompanied by a bouquet of Paul Neyron roses. In his note he talked about my father as a passionate man, a true Cuban whose soul knew the burning flames of love. During the service, his words were read by Mario Vargas Llosa (in the United States for a Harvard residency), who choked from emotion before delivering his own rather humorous remembrance of my father.
I sat in a state of dull grace, Leni next to me, occasionally touching my wrist as if discreetly checking for a pulse. The truth is, I didn’t know the man Farraluque or Vargas Llosa described as my father.
“This is so incredible,” my mother whispered to me across my aunt’s heaving bosom. Did she recognize my father in these peoples’ memories? “I . . . I don’t know what your father would think,” my mother continued. She dabbed at her dry mouth, her finger lightly touching the mole on her cheek.
“He’d be proud,” I whispered back. It was the right thing to say, certainly—I recognized it as the words spilled from my mouth—but I had no idea, not really, whether they could also be true. I felt Leni’s hand covering mine.
“I don’t know,” my mother said as my aunt shifted uncomfortably at being ignored. She sniffled and coughed. “He didn’t like people talking about him . . . not even good things,” my mother said. “You know, he blushed so easily . . .”
All his life, my father had been a quiet, private man, so there was little reason to think he would draw many people to his memorial, except perhaps his Loyola colleagues (which included a number of clergy), a few of his students, and maybe, if they just happened to be available, as was the case with Vargas Llosa, the writers for whom he’d been instrumental.
But to our amazement, the chapel filled with all sorts of folks: old men from the Cuban-American Chamber of Commerce who considered him an outstanding citizen, the ordinary guys from factories and security jobs with whom he’d played dominoes, immigrants from all over the neighborhood whom he’d helped with letters and legal papers (always for free), and even a representative from the mayor’s office, who insisted on reading a proclamation honoring my father for his achievements. The service was ignored by English-language TV and radio, but cameras from the Spanish-language networks came and taped special reports.
There were plenty of people I didn’t recognize, warm Cuban bodies who would, after a few words with my mother (and my sobbing aunt), turn to me and press me to them for a few seconds, whispering their sorrow in my ear, telling me how noble a man my father was. “A great patriot,” more than one man told me, “the kind of Cuban that would make José Martí proud.” I said nothing, just smiled weakly, always peeking back at my mother, who’d inevitably moved on to the next person.
There were plenty of non-Cubans in attendance, too: Jews and Mexicans, recently arrived Russians, the entire maintenance staff at Loyola (which was mostly Polish and African-American), people from a Puerto Rican cultural center I didn’t know my father had helped start back in 1977, after the riots in Humboldt Park (another surprise). There was a little brown man who never said anything to anyone, just played with the brim of his worn blue golf cap. And, for almost the entire service, a fidgety old man, his chalky body disfigured, sitting in a wheelchair in the back, fussing and angrily mumbling to his attendant, a round African-American woman, who patiently moved up the blanket around his waist, pushed his heavy, dark glasses back up on his nose, and held his hand when he got weepy.
I don’t know precisely when it was the old man exited, only that he was already gone when my mother and I, after many more greetings from friends and strangers, finally began to walk out of the chapel at the end of the service. When we got outside to the dazzling August light, she and I—we were holding hands, just the two of us—found ourselves momentarily jolted. As my own eyes cleared, I saw the old man through gray and orange flashes, his mouth downturned and sour, right next to a van with a lift that was obviously waiting for him.
“Oh my god!” my mother screamed, letting go of my fingers as if they were on fire and throwing me off balance for an instant.
As I tried to clear my own sun-stunned vision, I saw the cloudy smudge of my mother dashing across the walk, fuzzy arms in the air, her voice shrill, throwing herself in the old man’s crippled lap and sobbing like I had never seen. I know I was not the only one paralyzed by the scene: My tía Gladys, Mrs. Choy, and Leni all stood, jaws dropped, eyes wide. As I focused I saw the old man staring ahead as if blind, his jittery hand attempting to stroke my mother’s head.
“Ale!” my mother called to me, turning around and waving me over excitedly. “Ale! Come here, Ale!” Her face
was wet and hot, the blood having rushed to her temples; veins shivered on the surface, blue-green like her mole, and feverish.
“Alejandra?” said the old man, his mouth working hard to pronounce my name. Tufts of white stood out from his head. Then he laughed a little and I saw delicate streams of tears escaping from under the tinted glasses that obscured the abyss of his blank, black pupils.
At my mother’s house, while Mr. and Mrs. Choy helped serve a Cuban-Chinese buffet (fried rice, black beans, pot stickers, and tamales, among other things) for our guests, ninety-seven-year-old Gregor Olinsky—blind, cathetered, and completely dependent on his attendant, a woman named, appropriately enough, I thought, Rose—held center stage. He told stories about the Holocaust, about bribing his way into Cuba when the United States denied him a visa, about the irony of coming to Miami after the revolution with a passport stamped REPATRIATED all over it, and then becoming a real estate tycoon in Detroit.
Mostly, though, he talked about the mystery of my father, who, according to Olinsky, had denied his fate by ignoring the gift of his hands, the way they caressed the earth and understood its secrets.
“I loved him, yes, it’s true, but sometimes—and I don’t mean to be disrespectful, I don’t mean this to be taken the wrong way, okay?—he was not very smart, that Enrich,” he said, to the horror of the other guests, especially my tía Gladys, who gasped, put down her plate, and walked out of the room, offended.
“The . . . the nerve!” she huffed in the kitchen as Mike Kauf tried to calm her. “Where is his respect for the dead? A man that old, doesn’t he realize people could be talking about him that way very soon?”
My mother, however, picked at her food with a fork in a conspiratorial fashion and giggled. To my disbelief, she seemed comforted by Olinsky and his outrageousness.
“Okay, he did well with the translations and the teachings, yes, but can you imagine what he would have become if he’d surrendered to the destiny of his hands?” he continued. “They were beautiful, beautiful hands!”
My mother nodded in affirmation. When the old man started in on the story of our escape from Cuba, she howled, spilling her food from the exertion. Mrs. Choy appeared on cue with a Dustbuster and a paper towel, and Mr. Choy right behind her handed my mother a fresh plate with considerably smaller portions.
“I mean, who else but Enrich would plan to fly out of Cuba on the very day of Bay of Pigs, huh? Who else?” Olinsky said, a line of drool measuring the distance between his chin and lap. Rose wiped his face with a folded white cloth. “One of our shop’s drivers was involved with the underground—with the CIA, really—so I had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen. I tried to tell him he’d never fly out of Cuba. I mean, everybody knew except Enrich—those Kennedy fools had practically run an ad in the New York Times!”
I was sitting on the living room sofa with usually shock-free Leni, who was now thoroughly astonished by the way the old man was carrying on—all to my mother’s apparent delight. But after hearing about my father’s futile attempts at going to school, at romance (prior to my mother), at dancing and dominoes (Olinsky was amazed he had regular partners in Rogers Park), I’d had just about enough.
I leaned forward from the couch, my shoulders stiff. Even before I opened my mouth, the room had grown tense. “Mr. Olinsky, if you thought my father was such a bumbler, what are you doing here?” I demanded.
The entire room—Leni, the Choys, my cousins, everyone— turned my way as Olinsky’s sightless eyes swung from my mother to me. “I came to honor him,” he said without hesitation, “because he had the purest heart of anyone I’ve ever known.”
My mother nodded again, whimpering, barely looking up from her new plate of food.
My mother, Rose, and I helped take Olinsky down our front steps at the conclusion of the visit. A huffing Rose held the back of the wheelchair and led, tilting Olinsky, while my mother gripped his foot rests. I walked next to them, carrying his bag of medicines and supplies. “You don’t like me, Alejandra,” he said, but the bastard was smiling.
I glanced at my mother as she straightened up, searching for clues for a response. Did she expect me to deny it? To insist otherwise just to please him? But when she finally focused my way, she smiled weakly and shrugged.
“That’s okay, I’m not very likable,” muttered Olinsky as Rose swiveled the chair toward the waiting van on the curb. “Why would you like me, eh?”
Rose parked him on the sidewalk, took the bag from my hands and rushed to the car, setting its gears and the lift in motion. After the lift had dropped to the ground, she came around, positioned Olinsky in it, and locked the chair in place. My mother made a grand show of farewell, with a big hug and lots of kisses and promises to stay in touch. Then Rose pressed a magic button that boosted Olinsky into the air and pulled him back into the van. She unbuckled the chair and pushed him into the passenger’s side.
“Vamos,” my mother said, tapping me on the shoulder.
I had just started to turn around when I heard Olinsky call out to me. “Come here, young lady,” he said from the car’s open window. I cringed at his command. My mother gave me a nudge forward. “Hrrrmmmph,” the old man said.
“What?” I answered, not moving, but he wouldn’t speak again, just twitched and grimaced. My mother was getting annoyed so I gave in and stepped up to the van. “What?” I said again.
“You don’t have to like me but you have no reason to be so angry with me,” he said; it was a scolding. “I think you’re just angry at your father.” In the driver’s seat now, Rose nodded.
“Fairly simple psychology,” I said, exhausted.
“Yes, well, I’m a simple man,” he said, clearly sarcastic. “I think you’re mad at him not just for dying but for making you go back to Cuba, to have to spread his ashes, no?”
“I’m mad at him for dying, yes, and for getting cremated,” I said, surprised by my own admission.
“His decision,” snapped Olinsky. “He understood dirt better than you and me. What do we know? What do you care?”
What did I care? How many people did I know who’d stipulated cremation in their wills? I knew both Leni and Seth, Jews, too, had embraced that way for themselves, so why did it bother me so much that my father, a pseudo-Jew, had chosen it, too?
“Hmm . . . you know your father’s Hebrew name, no?”
“Elías.”
“Elijah, yes.”
“So?”
My mother was nervously waiting on the walk back to the house, her arms across her chest. My aunt and Leni both stepped up now, my aunt draped along my mother’s shoulders. Leni was waiting for disaster, I could tell.
“Elijah was swept up to heaven bodily by a whirlwind, if I remember correctly,” said the old man. He coughed. “Maybe that’s what your father wanted, to be lifted up by one of those powerful tropical gales down there.”
When I return to Cuba in 1997, I decide to visit Ytzak’s grave in Guanabacoa, just outside of Havana. Orlando takes me on a blue, cloudless day. Although he has been to the Jewish cemetery many times, he’s unsure of where my great-grandfather is buried, and so he stops at a little office at the front gate and tries to get help. Across the street from the graveyard, a handful of schoolboys play ball in a gravelly, arid lot. They use a stick for a bat.
“There’s no one here,” Orlando says with a sigh as he steps back outside. “Maybe we can find it by ourselves, it’s not that big a cemetery.”
We walk past the tight rows of tombs, all cracked blue-veined marble and white pigeon splotches. The trees are few and scraggly, affording us little shade, but they smell green and sweet.
“Cohen, Shiller, Amado, Velázquez, Bello, Maldonado,” Orlando reads from the headstones. He tries hard to pronounce each non-Spanish name correctly, looking over at me for approval.
I take his hand, feeling the rubbery skin of his palm between my fingers. “Is it true what they say about the prenda judía?” I ask.
“Is what true?
”
“That it takes the skull of a Jew?” I look around at all the tombs, pieces scattered like broken pottery.
He shakes his head. “That’s a lie,” he says. “First of all, you don’t ever need a whole skull for anything in palo monte, just a little bit of bone, so that its spirit can be evoked. But it can be any bone, any size, just a chip.”
“But is it more powerful if it’s from a Jew? That’s what I’ve always heard.”
He sighs again. “Look, Ale, where do you get this stuff?” He stops to explain. “That’s an old Christian thing. For them, anybody who wasn’t baptized was a Jew—I mean, I’d count as a Jew. They don’t mean a Jew like the Menachs or your father or Ytzak.”
We both stop talking at the same time. We hadn’t realized it at first but we’re right in front of Ytzak’s grave. “Antonio Ytzak Garazi, 1881–1980” reads the headstone. There’s a little Star of David underneath. I touch the marker and it’s cool.
As I reach down to the warm earth for a pebble or two, a young man runs up to us. He’s out of breath, his unshaven face smudged with chocolate, his plaid shirt open from missing buttons. “You were looking for me,” he says to Orlando. We both notice he’s carrying the remnants of an American candy bar in his left fist. Some of the ball-playing schoolboys linger behind him; it’s impossible to tell if they’re with him or on the chase. “I’m Rene, I’m the caretaker,” he says by way of explanation. He’s still chewing a bite of the chocolate, gasping a bit, too. He looks like something’s not right about him, like he’s slow or demented.
“It’s okay,” I say, waving him away. “We thought we needed help finding a grave but we found it ourselves. Thank you.”
As Rene starts to go, he sees me put a little pile of rocks on Ytzak’s headstone. “Excuse me,” he says, “do you know who that was?”
Orlando and I glance at each other. “Her great-grandfather,” he says.
“Was he, you know, important?”
“Well, he was a veteran of the war of independence,” I say, suddenly flushed with pride.