Days of Awe

by Achy Obejas

  I looked closely at Fidel: Every exile I know is constantly seeing age spots, signs of Parkinson’s, dribble, an addled response to a question, a maniac’s gleam. But the truth is that, as usual, he looked the same to me: a man typical of his age, his hair and beard dashed with salt, his tired but handsome face coursed with lines, a moment of confusion now and again.

  Within a few days of his resurrection, it was almost as if Fidel had personally answered my mother’s taunts: A note from the Cuban Special Interests Section came, announcing that Havana had refused to grant her a visa.

  “But why? Why?” she pleaded between moans. “This destierro will kill me!”

  I held her and cried with her and, when her breathing had returned to normal, I called the Interests Section myself, begging the bureaucrats there for an explanation.

  “My mother is an old woman,” I said. “She’s a housewife, a widow. Her only desire in returning is to scatter her husband’s ashes.”

  But the clerks held their silence, refusing to be tempted by any of my exhortations. As I hung up the phone I watched my mother as if from an impossibly increasing elevation: an ever-shrinking black dot in a vast wasteland. Soon she’d vanish completely, from black to gray to dust.

  There are words, I know from my old talks with my father, which never quite translate. In English, destierro always converts to exile. But it is not quite the same thing. Exile is exilio, a state of asylum. But destierro is something else entirely: It’s banishment, with all its accompanying and impotent anguish. Literally, it means to be uprooted, to be violently torn from the earth.

  XXXVI

  When I return to Cuba with my father’s ashes, the Menachs have cleared the barbacoa for me as a guest room. When I stand up in it, I can feel the ceiling just above my head, and though there is a window—the one where I first glimpsed Orlando ten years before— the loft has a stifling, airless feeling. The walls are margarine yellow, stained with sticky bluish leaks from the roof. There’s a poster of a young Madonna on a gondola in Venice, and another of Enrique Iglesias dressed in white like a santero. When Orlando hands my bag up the ladder to me (I refuse to let him play valet with me), it lands with a thud next to the thin mattress that will serve as my bed. The floor, made of warped pressed wood, quivers.

  Ten years after my initial visit, it’s as if time has stood still here—yet nothing is the same. The panorama decays while struggling to retain its shape. Everything and everyone has been weathered and patched a thousand times. The Menachs’ house is itself held up by dozens of wooden beams tied together and pressed against an outside wall. They are round like telephone poles, cracks revealing a chalky white inside that looks like bones. Grass grows in stiff bursts all around the upright logs. “We . . . we had a problem after the last hurricane,” Orlando says, embarrassed as he grabs my things from the car’s trunk. At the front door, I notice the mezuzah is chipped now, the bottom of it completely gone, the prayer scroll missing.

  I want to talk to Moisés about the photo my father gave me in his last moments, but as I begin to explain that I have something for him, the old man just walks away, his gaze blank, chicken legs uneasy. Moisés is seventy-seven now, my father’s age if he were still alive, but he is tentative about everything. His eyes swim in a milky pond, surrounded by rings so ashen they look like burnt charcoal. At one point during the ride from the airport he stares at me as if trying to find me through the haze of a house on fire. “Ah, Alejandra!” he finally says, slapping his forehead. “Yes, yes, it’s you.”

  This time around, the grand Menach front room is as empty and cool as a tomb. A new wall made of flimsy cardboard and uneven plaster divides it in two, separating it from where the dining table used to be. The cracks shimmer like tiny sapphires. The room is more of a box now, a vestibule, where Rodolfo, the patriarchal zombie, sits under a flimsy white sheet with the dead TV set. The only sign of his breathing is the soft, intermittent billowing of the fabric around the wet circle where his mouth should be. Still framed up on the wall, the numbers on Moisés’s lottery ticket are obscured by ancient mold.

  Was it always this dank, this dim? I ask myself as I climb the ladder to the barbacoa. My own vision is blurred, smudged by emotions. Was it always this way?

  During my stay, the Menachs have rearranged their lives. The loft is normally where Yosemí, now a pudgy young woman with round rolls of flesh cushioning every joint, and baby Paulina, grown to a buoyant, skinny adolescent with caterpillar eyebrows, sleep. Yosemí is as serious as ever, only now her features have a strange serenity about them. The two of them have been parceled out during my stay—Yosemí downstairs, to what is now Rafa’s room (and used to be Ernesto’s), while Paulina stays nights with Deborah, who has grown up to be an artist and lives with her boyfriend in a small converted warehouse on Muralla Street.

  Rafa, I’m told, spends most of his time with his girlfriend, although he’s around—eating and drinking, taking up space at the kitchen table but not helping with the preparations for the night’s meal. Due to hassles with my visa and flights, I’ve managed to arrive on Rosh Hashanah and the family is gathered here, readying dinner. Ester lumbers from one end of the room to the other, watching pots of boiling water, stirring the skillet with a mangled piece of plastic that might at one time have been a spatula.

  No one says anything but it is clear when I finally see Rafa that he and Orlando, his father, barely speak. Instead of the beautiful teenage boy I once met, Rafa is now a sullen young man with yellowed half moons under his eyes, as if he’s never quite recovered from his childhood illnesses. When we meet this time, he is monosyllabic and unenthusiastic, kissing me hello out of obligation and quickly shooting his father an accusatory glance.

  “Listen, I really don’t need that much room,” I protest to Moisés and Ester about the loft. “There’s no reason why Yosemí and Paulina can’t also stay up there.” I haven’t finished speaking before Moisés washes his hands and leaves the kitchen.

  “Oh, please, Alejandra,” says Yosemí with a blissful smile. “I’m happy to give you my room.”

  “That’s because that way she doesn’t have to haul her fat ass up the ladder!” says a sulky Paulina.

  “Hey!” Orlando’s head spins toward his twelve-year-old, who runs out of the kitchen, disappearing behind the new wall. Yosemí shrugs, smiles again.

  “What is it with her? Why is she so mean?” Orlando says to no one in particular.

  “It’s her age,” Yosemí says with an understanding so earnest it sounds false. She’s carefully cutting an onion on a scratched wooden board, her eyes watering freely. The white bits look like dozens of little teeth swimming in clear saliva. Above breasts as ample and soft as her mother’s, I spy the gold crucifix around Yosemí’s neck that Orlando has told me about. Is her new faith what keeps her here, so righteously? Or will it serve as a passport out?

  A tired Ester shakes her head. Rafa, who’s straddling a chair and leaning his chin on its back, snickers. He’s so scruffy: unshaven, in a dirty T-shirt and expensive Prada pants, turquoise and soft as velvet. They must have cost about $700—I can’t begin to fathom how he got them.

  “Listen, Alejandra, why don’t you get some fresh air, go for a walk?” says Ester. Then to Orlando: “Go on, take her to the Malecón. This will be a while yet.”

  I swallow, struggling with unexpected shame. I may be visiting the Menachs but in this moment what becomes clear is that I’m Orlando’s friend, his charge, his project.

  At the Malecón, the craggy lip around the city, we scratch the skin on the crumbling bulkhead and pitch pieces of gravel into the fetid waters. They gurgle below us, green and black. With the tide low and the coral naked, bare-chested children play in oily pools, skip stones on the surface and chase the elusive shadows slithering underneath. An old man leans against the wall as if he’s been there forever, intoning his unchanging litany: “Por el amor de dios, por el amor de dios.” In the distance, a ship’s horn wails mournful and long.
r />   “You don’t know what happened here—how empty bowls became units of currency . . .” says Orlando, out of the blue. “You don’t know . . .”

  He tells me how his son has learned to split his brain in half: one side convinces him he is in love and is loved by a wonderful young woman who works long, arduous hours as a tour guide to help support both her family and him; the other half twinges each time she comes home with a gift from a Spanish or German friend, exceedingly generous gentlemen who buy her clothes and appliances or just give her money to ease her hardship.

  “With each new item she brings home, Rafa loses a function,” says Orlando. “For example, he can no longer multiply. He says this is okay, that zero times zero is still zero for all of infinity. But for a while, he couldn’t keep his eyes open. This was after his girlfriend received a stereo system. He was perfectly awake, but his lids would drop like steel doors. He had no control over them, couldn’t blink, couldn’t cry. Deborah devised these tiny clothespins and pinned them back, but his eyes got dry and infected from all the things that flew into them and Rafa almost went blind. A new shirt will cost him the use of his hands for a week, $300 in currency will constipate him. Those pants he has on? He was deaf for days because of them. The only thing that restores the lost function is when the men who give his girlfriend these things leave, when he can see that Iberia or Lufthansa flight arching across the sky.”

  To make matters worse, Orlando explains, Rafa is crazy about his little sister Paulina and quite often his girlfriend will pass on perfumes and athletic shoes, dresses and compact discs, making Rafa a momentary hero, and making it even harder for him to resist temptation, to see the situation for what it is.

  “Rafa is mentally twelve, like Paulina, and she likes American things,” Orlando says, “much to her grandfather’s chagrin.” There are Barbie dolls, and Levi 501s; there are those posters up in the loft. “She thinks Rafa is a magician, she thinks he is Superman. But he is nobody, he is nothing.”

  “But what does the girlfriend get from having Rafa around?” I ask, confused.

  Orlando takes my hands in his. They are warm, meaty. Our fingers dance around each other and my heart rises in my throat. Then he slumps against the seawall, looks north to the orange and amber mists of sunset.

  “What does she get besides a foolish boy who really loves her? Two things . . .” he says with a sigh. “One, because he has applied for aliyah, and because he is a Menach, I suppose, and might actually get it, she sees the possibility of leaving the country. They’d have to marry—he’d marry her now if she said yes, but she is leaving that option open, that’s clear. And the second thing . . . is me.”

  “You?” I yank my hands away with a gasp, step back, and tuck them under my pits, which are suddenly damp and tart. What is he saying? Is he going to try to tell me another Celina story? How twisted can this man be? “What the fuck do you mean you?”

  “Me,” he says again, emphatically. “Me, the chauffeur. Who the hell do you think drives her on her tours? Who the hell do you think chaperons her dates?”

  For the rest of the evening, I have a headache—a thunder-clapping, medieval vise of a headache. I barely talk at dinner, barely touch the food though it is plentiful and fills the house with a salty smoke. Everyone else chatters and grunts. It isn’t like ten years ago, when the babble was high-pitched and energetic; this time, it’s the tired, low mumble of old men at prayers. At one point, I finally excuse myself—the throbbing is so awful I can barely keep my eyes open from the pain. I throw myself into the black front room, stumbling for the ladder to the barbacoa. No one protests, no one tries to stop me except Orlando.

  “Alejandra,” he says. Even if my emotions weren’t swirling, I wouldn’t be able to see him: He is standing in shadows, his voice coming at me from the bottom of a well.

  I start up the ladder, one step at a time.

  “Alejandra, I’m so sorry,” he says in a hoarse whisper. He reaches for my hand—his own palm is moist and warm—but I snatch it away.

  I think my eyes are closed, I can’t tell. I grope for the floor above me.

  “You don’t understand,” he says. His hand is on my lower back now, supporting my weight, helping me up.

  “You’re right,” I manage to say.

  “Rafa doesn’t know about the girl,” he says in explanation. “He doesn’t want to know. And she would never stay with him . . . if I stopped helping. He’s my son, my idiot son. And she’s the only woman in his life. It’s that simple.”

  I shake my head, I rattle my skull. It’s that simple? Is he kidding me? “How the fuck do you get yourself into these incredible situations?” I ask through gritted teeth.

  “I live in Cuba, Alejandra, I live in Cuba,” Orlando says. Then he steps back into the darkness, leaving me in the air.

  Hours later, Moisés steps on the ladder of the barbacoa to let me know they’re headed for evening services at the temple. “Are you coming?” he asks.

  I crawl over to the hole in the floor and lean down—they’re in a tenebrous ether, just their faces floating above the murk. Ester is exhausted; Rafa is restless and embarrassed; Paulina, listlessly hanging off her brother’s arm. But Moisés gazes up like a holy man, his aimless eyes shiny beacons in an infinite sea.

  “I . . . I think I’m beat from the trip,” I say. Every joint aches, my forehead is heavy and greasy from sweat.

  “Well then . . .” he says, clearly disappointed, his lifeless eyes dropping to the floor.

  “But tomorrow . . . can we spend some time together tomorrow? I have some things for you, including a photo from my father—it’s of a girl on a boat . . .” but before I finish Moisés’s hand is flapping through the air like a silvery fish on a hook, not just dismissing me the way Olinsky might have, but trying desperately to get away. I never have the chance to tell him about the simple box filled with my father’s ashes and covered in plastic that I’ve got permanently tucked into my backpack.

  “May you be inscribed and sealed in the book of life!” he says as he disappears, but it sounds more like a rebuke than a wish.

  I hear the rest of the family shuffling after him. In the kitchen, water runs for the dishes and I assume the newly evangelized Yosemí has stayed behind. Outside, Orlando fires up the car’s engine. Doors open and slam shut. As the tires turn on the loose gravel I hear Paulina’s cruel cry from the car’s backseat: “Next year in Miami, Abuelo, next year in Miami!”

  Many hours later, I hear noises in the kitchen that now exceed the ordinary clang and splash of water on pots and pans. There’s a lively stepping back and forth, as well as a honeyed female voice uttering a peculiar chant: “Qua qua—quack quack . . . Miao— meow . . . Au au—bow wow . . . Quiquiríqui—cock-a-doodle-doo.” (Actually, she struggles with cock-a-doodle-doo; it sounds more like Co-ha-dudel-du.)

  I glance quickly at my watch, its whaleskin numbers indicate I’ve been sleeping for an eternity: It’s two A.M., the middle of the night. If the Menachs are back, I never heard the car drive up, never heard their footsteps, the sound of chairs moving, of teeth being brushed, of the refrigerator opening, of water flushing or being spit back out before sleeping. I heard nothing.

  I scramble down, scratching my elbow in the process, and scan the room with feline eyes. Rodolfo, the ghoulish elder, is a white shadow in his rocking chair, which squeaks as he tips forward, then back. It is not a free-flowing movement but careful calculation: Even in the unremitting night of the room I can see him pitching forward just enough to squeeze out his trebly peep, then inching back with satisfaction.

  I peer past the jagged caulk of the new wall to the kitchen only to be blinded by the naked bulb in the overhead fixture. It’s a floating white orb, a spinning planet, a free spirit. I snap back into the shadows, my head against the craggy plaster, fuzzy bursts of color playing before me. I don’t know how long I’m standing here, like a criminal hiding from the law—I’m breathing like I just ran a terrified mile, I’m cold with sweat a
nd fear—when I feel a scalding, rugged hand on my shoulder, then another on the back of my neck. I spasm against my will, I shiver.

  “Alejandra?” It’s a woman’s voice, husky and sweet. I feel her breath on my face but the sound is coming from a distance—from a harbor, a pier, a splintered coral key in the middle of nowhere.

  “Alejandra, are you all right? Can you hear me?”

  Her Spanish is perfect, confidently Cuban, full of billowy vowels but with intact consonants.

  “Water,” she says.

  And I hear water: It trickles, cascades, pulls at me with a moan. I feel its moist embrace, my own feverish spit merging into its cool stream.

  XXXVII

  In the English-speaking world, Yamim Nora’im—the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—is translated as the days of awe. But in Cuba, all element of wonder is erased, giving way to fatalism and terror. In Cuba, the holiest days in the Jewish calendar are called los días terribles—the terrible days.

  When I return in 1997, there are barely any signs of the holidays. Life goes on: the roosters cackle and car horns blare at dawn, the neighborhoods explode with raucous music and argument by noon, and the sun blinds the eyes and scours the soul. At the city’s Central Park, the debate rages about the merits of Marlins pitcher Liván Hernández and the tragic fate of his brother, El Duque.

  Every stoop is occupied at all hours, there’s always someone rapping at the door selling lightbulbs, overripe avocados, or slices of a wilting wedding cake. (Each time there’s a knock, my heart jumps with the hope it’ll be Celina come over to visit, but it’s always a stranger.) When it rains, people worry about buildings crumbling, but after the downpours—cuando escampa—they run to see what can be scavenged from the rubble: doorknobs and lamp fixtures, a child’s rattle, and bricks to patch other shaky walls.