Days of Awe

by Achy Obejas

  “Quite a day,” he says with a sigh after a brief silence.

  I can’t talk. I’m too distressed, too flabbergasted by what I’ve seen: Estrella and a now retired Johnny are running a private club for foreigners out of their home. I’m taken aback by the way Johnny has reverted to his old playboy persona, even if it’s just on the surface, and that Estrella has surrendered. This, I keep asking myself, is the same strong woman who was willing to sacrifice it all for principle? For love? These two people turning tricks for foreign currency are the same two proud Cubans I used to know?

  “Doesn’t it upset you?” I ask Orlando, who understands what I mean without my needing to explain. He shrugs. “I just don’t get it,” I say, “I just don’t get it.”

  “If you lived here, then maybe you’d get it,” he says. “Maybe you’d even be a part of it.”

  “I can’t imagine that,” I say, absolute, defiant. “Doesn’t it turn your stomach, the way they were catering to those foreigners—all men, I might add? And these were people who never had it so bad.”

  Orlando nods as he drives, the night air crisp as it filters through the car’s open windows. “They were catering to you, too,” he says softly.

  “Yes,” I admit, swallowing hard, “but it’s different.”

  “Is it?” He fixes me in his gaze, letting the car drift on its own for a second or two.

  “Yes,” I say with a startling confidence. (I have been surprising myself all day.) “Whatever you may think of me, I was born here . . . that means something. I was born here—like Martí, like you.”

  Orlando says nothing, just drives, taking in all that I’m saying but refusing to engage with me. And suddenly, it’s all maddening to me.

  “Doesn’t it enrage you that that club even exists?” I ask, goading him. “I mean, even if you had dollars, it’s not as if you could go there . . . that club doesn’t even exist officially, right? They still probably wouldn’t let you in, just because you’re Cuban—and those women . . . they could be your wife, your daughters.”

  Orlando nods again, this time with a sardonic smile. “It is my wife, remember?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I say, shaken, vanquished.

  “Look, of course it’s upsetting,” he says, waving his hand in the air like his father-in-law, “but I’m way past that stage. You know what I think now? I think that if somebody’s going to make money, if someone’s going to live well in Miramar, I’d rather it be Cubans. And if it’s going to be Cubans who profit from all this, I’d rather it be people like Johnny and Estrella—because they’re essentially decent people—than others who were so much more revolutionary, or who were trying to leave the country until two minutes ago. Those girls are going to find a place to go with their Italians and Spaniards and I’d rather they go there, where they won’t be beaten, where there’s some privacy and cleanliness, than to some dark room in some creep’s house, or to a hotel where the foreigner’s always right, even when he’s slapping a girl around just for fun.”

  “I can’t believe you,” I say, horrified. “You’re saying it’s okay!”

  “No, no, no,” he insists. “I’m saying this is not a perfect world, there are no good choices here, not now.”

  “Then why are you still here?” I ask, shocked by my own question. “You know so many foreigners. Why haven’t you left?” I have to stop myself from telling him not to answer, I have to stop myself from apologizing for my audacity.

  “Where would I go?” he asks. “To the U.S.? And what would I do? Look at me,” he says, his eyes luminous. “I’m a socialist economist in a capitalist world, a fifty-year-old chauffeur for foreigners who was once a young patriot, convinced that we Cubans would change the world, that we would set the example. I’m now taking tips from the very people I thought we’d help. Isn’t life ironic? I’m dependent on them now for the worst kind of charity.”

  “I . . . I’m sorry,” I say, ashamed.

  “This is the part I don’t know that you’ll understand: The truth is, I’ll never leave,” he says. “It’s not a matter of belief, because I still believe. I still believe we needed to do everything we did, it’s just that . . . look, look around . . . it didn’t quite work out how we’d hoped. There are many reasons for it, many guilty parties, and not all of them are in Miami or Washington. And now, who will take care of my family? I can’t do much, I’m no hero here, but what moral choice have I got?”

  That night, Orlando and I finally make love.

  He simply pulls off the road on the way home, dogs howling nearby, and our bodies cling to each other in a sea of absolution. His mouth is honeyed, his calloused hands sturdy, skin fragrant like apricots. His sex is ripe fruit splitting its skin and heavy with juice. (He never enters me with it, he never comes.)

  He takes things slowly, even later, when we dance together in the airless and orgiastic moonlit pit at La Tropical, magnificent bodies writhing like eels in the deep, and his fingers dip down in the dark between my legs until I’m quivering, every inch of me drenched.

  I am always breathless, awed, caught in the pitch of a heat stroke, suffocating. When I finally let go and air pops into my lungs again, I cry each time, just like a newborn covered with blood and brine.

  XXXVIII

  There are a few theories about when Jews first arrived in Cuba and the Americas.

  The first proposes that the inhabitants of the continent whom we view as indigenous and call Native Americans or Indians are actually the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. According to this story, Jews somehow sailed across the blue from northern Africa and first populated this vast and sylvan continent. Disconnected from Judah and the Levites, they eventually lost their Jewish identity but retained certain rites and values, especially of the mystic variety. Symbols such as the Star of David still linger, although often hidden or distorted, in contemporary native pottery and talismans.

  Subscribers to this line of thought often see these Jews through an ideal prism: Connected to the earth and the spirits, they lived collectively and naturally, their Eden interrupted only when the white men, with their viruses and criminality, upset the balance of their idyllic American environment.

  This is what Moisés, who has never left Cuba in his life, prefers to believe. He cherishes the notion that the lost tribes might be found and likes to think that every man he meets is his brother, that every act of kindness on the island lifts them all closer to redemption. He doesn’t believe all of Cuba’s Indians perished but that they intermingled, that they spiked the general population with their blood, each Cuban, if not each Latin American, from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego, an unwitting Jew, part of god’s plan to save humankind through—what else?—the eventual triumph of Marxist revolution, the embodiment of Talmudic promise.

  A second theory says it was with Columbus that Jews first came, men like Triana and de Torres and the first American San José, hiding behind baptisms and crucifixes but Jews nonetheless. In his seminal Historia de una Pelea Cubana Contra los Demonios, a book about an inquisitional exorcism, Fernando Ortiz in one of his many digressions suggests that even such quintessential Cubans as José Martí and Antonio Maceo probably came from a long line of forgotten crypto-Jews.

  Those who buy this idea often paint anusim such as my relatives not as assimilationists but as part of an intrepid resistance. Against all odds, these men and women persevered in their Jewishness. In this way, it can be construed that it was Jewish thought—Jewish values—that underpinned the concepts of justice that men like Martí and Maceo first brought to Cuban independence.

  Deborah, Orlando’s artist daughter, is behind this one because she likes the idea of resistance, of subversion against the established order, of secret meetings and rituals. For Deborah, revolution is constant, meaningful precisely because its work is never done.

  A third theory is vaguer, less heroic to Jews and their heirs, but perhaps more acceptable to historians and thus more common. This one claims Jews first
came to Cuba in the twilight of the nineteenth century, along with all the other displaced Europeans who began landing on American shores. Later, as the Ottoman Empire crumpled, Turks—including, supposedly, Fidel’s maternal grandfather, presumed to be a converso and the source of his discreet but particular sympathy for the Jewish community—arrived by the thousands in Havana harbor.

  These Jews, however, do not provoke the same dewy-eyed fascination as the myths of the judeo-indigenous or the anusim because— though they really resisted wars and persecution in their home countries, survived the long transatlantic crossing, and the miserable poverty of life in the tropics—they were the great unwashed, the dark and disabled peddlers and cooks seen in the sepia-toned photos of a young and newly free Cuba.

  Within a few decades they would be displaced in popular thinking and in their own community by a great wave of more sophisticated European refugees from Nazism—Romanian doctors, Belgian jewelers, and Austrian merchants—who’d arrive with enough money to pay Cuban immigration officials’ exorbitant bribes, set up businesses, schools, and social groups.

  Instead of the soft judeo-español of the Sephardim, these newly arrived Askenazis spoke Yiddish and, often, English instead of Spanish. They made quick connections with Americans in Cuba, and with power brokers such as Batista, and lived with the certainty that when the horrors of the Holocaust were over, they would return to Antwerp with their diamonds or sail north to New York where they would be welcomed. Cuba to them was nothing more than a pit stop.

  It’s late and black when we enter the city the night Orlando and I return from visiting Barbarita in Varadero. A power outage has erased all color except for the shimmering blue of the night sky, the stars blinking. I glance next door quickly, hoping for Celina, but her apartment is still and shadowy. Upstairs, my family’s old place remains the same: shuttered and sealed. We pull up to the Menachs’ house, all lopsided and crumbling, and hear laughter from inside.

  “This is what happens when Deborah’s here,” Orlando says, love and pride mixed in his voice. “She always gets my father-in-law going, gets him telling stories and jokes. And then she turns it all around on him, using them in her performances and stuff. He protests but he’s delighted, he really is.”

  “You, too,” I note.

  I’m relieved to hear him; he has been sullen during the entire trip, unable to forgive me for saying life in Cuba might be possible after all. Although my conclusion should have, on the surface, brought us closer together, in fact it’s had the opposite effect.

  “Yeah,” he says with a sad smile and a sigh as he gets out of the car.

  Inside the house, we find Moisés and Deborah in the glow of candlelight in the kitchen. Everyone else is asleep, put away for the night. Even the ghostly Rodolfo is missing from his usual post. In the warm hues, Deborah is a picture of brio and beauty: Her face has traces of Africa, from her father’s side, and of Sepharad, from her mother’s. And yet she is so classically Cuban, her hands flying as she talks, her posture bold and sensual.

  “Hey!” she says, jumping up from her chair when she sees us.

  Moisés doesn’t share her excitement. As she hugs and kisses her father and me, the old man turns away, his face vanishing into the gloom.

  “What do you think, Alejandra?” Deborah asks. She and her grandfather are in the middle of their tireless debate: judeo-indigenous or crypto-Jews?

  “What do you think?” I repeat, aiming my question at Orlando.

  “It doesn’t matter what I think,” Orlando says as he reaches in the murky refrigerator for a warm beer. “I’m not a Jew obsessed with Jews, like you all. I’m a Cuban, obsessed with Cubans.”

  “Oh, please,” says Deborah, taking her seat again at the table. “Like you have to be a Jew to have an opinion? Like you’re not practically a Jew anyway, huh? And like you can’t be both?”

  “We are both,” Moisés declares, his voice low and flat. I watch him in the light, his pearly pupils luminous. And I think of Ytzak so many years ago and his insistence that he, too, was both: Cuban and Jew.

  “Well?” asks Orlando, leaning on the kitchen counter and popping open his beer. He takes a huge, noisy sip of the foam as it spills out the opening.

  They all look at me. “ ‘Well’ what?”

  “What do you think?” It’s Deborah.

  “I think,” I say feeling clever, “that both are perfectly valid opinions.”

  “Oh no!” moans Deborah, and her father and grandfather join her in a chorus of dismay.

  “What?” I protest. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “The question isn’t about the validity of the options,” says Orlando, laughing.

  “Yeah,” says Deborah, “it’s about what you think. You have to pick one.”

  “Why? Why not both?” I say defensively. “You guys get to be both Cuban and Jewish. Why can’t I like both stories?”

  “It’s not the same thing!” exclaims Deborah.

  “Both can’t be here first—they cancel each other out,” explains Orlando. “It’s one group or the other.”

  “You have to choose,” Deborah insists.

  “I don’t have to,” I say. “I can wonder, I can live with both possibilities.”

  Then suddenly Moisés reaches across the table. For an instant it’s clear he can’t see me very well so his fingers stretch out a bit awkwardly but eventually cover my hand with his warmth.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he says, his eyes fixed on me through their milky gauze. “And you’re right—why should you be forced to have only one opinion about this? Why not consider both? After all, we’ll never know the answer. And there are other things to think about, things that are maybe more urgent.”

  Deborah leans back in her chair, as if she’s considering the old man’s words. Orlando stares at the foam dripping from his fingers and into the sink.

  “Thank you,” I finally say to Moisés.

  “Yeah, you’re right, Abuelo,” Deborah says, abruptly dropping the chair back on the floor with a thud. “Alejandra’s American, she has other things to think about.”

  Moisés and I bristle at the same time. “I didn’t say that,” he says quickly. “Don’t misinterpret me.”

  “But it can’t be denied either,” says Orlando. “I mean, come on . . .”

  “No, but neither can any other part of her, especially being born here, being born here on such a special and complicated day,” says the old man. Then he reaches up, kisses my cheek, and says good night. For a moment, Orlando, Deborah, and I sit listening to Moisés as he shuffles down the dark hallway to bed. We look warily at each other.

  “He’s pretty amazing,” I whisper. “I mean, whether you agree with him or not, you have to tip your hat to him. His fidelity to the revolution is a real marvel.”

  Deborah shoots up from her chair, shakes her head. “Yes, yes, a real marvel,” she says, chuckling, and quickly kisses both me and Orlando good night. “I have to go,” she says, grabbing the car keys and waving them at her father. “I’ll have it back by morning, okay?”

  Orlando assents, still struggling with the web of suds flowing from the beer.

  “What the heck was that about?” I ask, staring off at Deborah’s trail.

  He smirks. “ ‘A marvel’? Have you any idea what’s been endured here?” he asks, taking his daughter’s now emptied seat and wiping his hands on his pants.

  “Look, I don’t pretend to have a handle on the kind of day-today detail and dilemma you have, Orlando. But, you know, I look at Moisés and I can’t help but think of Job—no matter what plague fell upon him, he endured, his faith unshaken.”

  Orlando laughs. “Oh, my father-in-law is biblical, all right,” he says with a chortle, “but you have the wrong story. He’s not Job, he’s Abraham. Remember Abraham, who was so faithful to his cause that he was willing to make lechón out of Isaac, his only son? Well, that’s my father-in-law, willing not just to sacrifice himself but everyone around him—always
true to the revolution.”

  “Orlando, what are you saying?”

  He waves his hand in a gesture that looks vaguely drunken, but I realize a few sips from a warm beer couldn’t have had such a profound effect. “Ale, listen, my father-in-law . . . he’s a great man, a really great man, I love him like, well, like more than a father, really,” he says. “But he’s fanatical—don’t you see that yet? Or are you as blind as he and everybody else in this family?”

  “Well, Deborah thinks I’m off the wall, so maybe you’re not alone . . .”

  “No, no, what rankles her is your . . . naïveté . . . she’s one of my father-in-law’s biggest fans, are you kidding? He’s her example, her role model,” says Orlando. “But there have been consequences to so much loyalty. Look, I’ll give you an example, just one. You know how important being Jewish is to him, right?”

  I nod.

  “So, of course, his kids—Ernesto and my ex-wife—they’re like, Cuban super-Jews. Temple, bar mitzvah for Ernesto, Hebrew for both of them, talk of Israel, at least a pilgrimage.”

  “Sure, of course.”

  “No!” Orlando says angrily. “Not ‘of course,’ let me finish, damn it.”

  He gets up, starts pacing. In the smoky blackness, he’s a shadow, featureless.

  “There was a time in this country, in my country—your country, too, since you’re so eager to claim it—when being religious was not such a good idea. Not that long ago either. Not just Christian but religious in any sense. Muslim, whatever. Obviously, Jews, too, a little bit more complicated than for others because of Israel and Zionism and all that. And when you were found out to be religious, you were instantly suspect. And so there were certain jobs you couldn’t get, certain careers you couldn’t study.”

  “I’ve heard that, yes. It was awful.”

  “You don’t know,” he says, gritting his teeth, fists at his side as he paces, occasionally running an anxious hand through his hair with a quick, exasperated gesture. “Let me translate for you, Alejandra. Ernesto and Angela were Jews in Cuba in their youth, with all that implies. Do you know what my father-in-law said to them when his own children were denied the benefits of his boundless loyalty? He said that that attitude would pass, that the revolution would recognize its mistakes and they’d get their opportunities later.”