“He’s a writer,” Mr. Stein said. He was suddenly thoughtful. “We’re going to talk to your mother and get to the bottom of this.” He stood up and pulled me out of the chair.
Cool air passed through me, right through me, as if I were suddenly incorporeal. I was going to be free. I could breathe. I was going to survive. We were going home and I would be safe with my mother.
Mr. Stein dragged me all the way up two flights of stairs. He didn’t release his handcuff—the skin on my wrist felt raw by then—even when Ruth answered the door.
For a moment Mr. Stein didn’t say anything, surprised by Ruth. My mother must have looked odd to him. I had become accustomed to the slovenliness of her appearance. She was wearing one of my father’s Brooks Brothers shirts. She wore them wrinkled, usually with nothing else on but panties, since the shirts trailed down to her knees. Thankfully, to answer the door she had pulled on a pair of chinos, also belonging to my father. These clothes were spattered with paint because she was redoing our apartment room by room, usually during the night. Often I found her in the morning asleep in a chair or on the couch, the brushes resting on the lips of opened cans nearby. Apparently she drifted off while taking a break. She had decided to use a different color for each room. In the case of the master bedroom she changed her mind twice, from faint pink to bright yellow and finally to light gray.
For a moment, we three looked at each other in silent confusion.
“Rafe?” she asked me in an uncertain tone.
I made one more great effort and yanked to be free of Mr. Stein. He let go. I touched the bruised spot. It felt as if my bone had been softened. I hurried into the apartment and stood behind my mother. The back of the blue Brooks Brothers shirt she had on was torn. Exposed by the billowing opening of the tear, I saw a line of gray paint crossing vertically on the bare skin of her skinny back. Where it intersected her spine, the bone rippled the line, so that it seemed alive. How had she painted a line on her own back?
“I wasn’t lying!” I said or something like it, forgetting that I had lied somewhat. I meant I wasn’t lying overall, that my intentions had been honest, that I was in fact a good person.
My mother dropped her arm around my shoulder. Her hand snaked around to my cheek and softly, but insistently, pulled the skin taut, distorting my mouth. “He lies a lot,” she said to Mr. Stein. Her tone was loving, not critical or disappointed. Her fingertips tugged at my cheek. I could easily have spoken despite their spidery hold on my face, but they communicated her wish that I keep quiet. “He’s very imaginative. I’m afraid my whole family is. I used to tell lies all the time. Fantastic lies. They were really my way of making myself more interesting. He’s probably told you all kinds of things about why his father is away. He misses him and I think he may be a little bit angry, so he makes up stories about why his Daddy can’t come home. The truth is he’s a reporter for the New York Times. He’s on assignment in Latin America, and he’s constantly moving around so there’s no point in our joining him down there. We don’t know when we’ll see him next. It’s hard on Rafe.”
“That’s not—!” I wanted to explain that it had nothing to do with all the secrets I wasn’t supposed to tell, about my father being in Cuba, Mom and Dad being Communists or the rest. But her web of fingers tugged a warning and I shut up before she interrupted me.
“That’s not what you were lying about this time?” she said, again with no hint of anger, in a sweet understanding tone.
Mr. Stein, back to his mouse-like squeak, finally spoke. “He told us a long involved—a whole thing about a softball tournament in school. Supposedly he’s the captain and he wanted Joseph to play. He was going to take him all over the city … supposedly to these baseball games.”
“I see.” Ruth pushed me away from her. “Go to your room. Go straight to your room. Don’t go poking around looking for your toys. Go straight to your room, shut the door and stay there until I come in. Go!”
I went. I heard the start of her apology to Mr. Stein.
“There’s probably some truth to it, but of course it’s a lie. You’ll have to forgive him—”
As I passed, I noticed that the door to her bedroom was closed. That was unusual. I didn’t think about it. I was enraged. I slammed my own door shut and hurled myself onto the bed. I pressed my face into the pillow. Wild anger pulsed in my head, the kind that makes you feel will explode your skin and scatter your character into unrecoverable bits.
Worse than the fury, however, was my confusion. Why had she done this? Why had she told such a diabolical lie, a lie that left my character in ruins? She had heard from Mr. Stein himself that his worries had nothing to do with Dad or Cuba and yet she had made me into a living paradox, someone who would be believed less and less the more he told the truth. I was in quicksand; my end would only be hastened by resistance. How could I free myself from what Mr. Stein would tell Joseph and, by extension, every friend of mine, their parents and finally (Washington Heights was a small town in this respect) my teachers? Even the candy store man who sold me baseball cards, Milky Ways, and Pinkies would hear of it eventually. I would be Rafe the liar to them all.
I couldn’t stand it. Longing for justice, I opened my door and walked out. My bedroom was the third in line off a narrow hall. A small bedroom, which my father used as a study, lay between my room and the master bedroom. All three shared a bathroom at my end of the hall. A strong smell of paint lingered in the windowless passageway. I took one step out of my room and stopped. I didn’t proceed into the living room and foyer to confront my mother and Mr. Stein because a strange man stood at the study door, looking at me.
Shocked, I inhaled sharply and held the breath.
The stranger whispered to me in an intense voice. When he was done, he put his finger over his lips. He spoke in Spanish but I knew enough to understand. He said, “I am a friend of your father’s. Be still.”
He was Latin. He looked a little like my stout, black-haired, round-faced Cousin Pancho. An Asturian, my father would say, referring to natives of the Spanish province of Asturias. “Pancho, you have the Asturian sturdiness,” my father liked to compliment his cousin. “You’re built like a thoroughbred bull. The one that gores the matador.” But I knew that my father preferred his own build, which he would praise using my body as a mirror. “You have the broad shoulders and narrow hips of the Gallego,” Francisco told me almost every time we were alone. “Women like that shape in a man,” he would add and smile into the distance. This strange Asturian moved on his toes toward the hall entrance. I remained stuck in place, holding my breath, watching him. I could hear that Mr. Stein was talking, but not the words.
“I understand,” my mother’s voice was loud, so loud I was startled. The Asturian also. He stopped in his tracks. Mom sounded strained and angry. “No further discussion is necessary. I’m sorry if any of this has caused trouble for you, although I don’t see how it has.”
“You don’t!” We could now hear Mr. Stein as well. The Asturian looked silly—he was stuck in mid-stride—arms out, heels off the floor. He settled back on his heels and sure enough, a loose floorboard groaned. We both gasped. But the sound of the front door shutting with a bang drowned out all those noises; and then Mom was there, staring at us with a look of surprise.
Surprised at what? Didn’t she know the Asturian was in the apartment? For an awful moment, I was scared I had made a mistake in keeping quiet.
“Rafe, I told you to stay in your room,” she said, thoroughly annoyed. “God damn it, don’t you listen to me?”
“Who was the man?” the Asturian asked in English. “A police?”
“No,” my mother frowned in disgust. “A nutty neighbor,” she dismissed him. “He lives on another floor. Wait a few minutes, then take the stairs. He’s nothing to worry about, anyway. He’s got nothing to do with the police.”
The Asturian turned to smile at me. “Your son,” he said in Spanish to my mother, “is very handsome. And intelligent, too,” h
e added. “He didn’t give me away.”
My mother walked over and hugged me. She ran her hands through my hair and pressed my face into her cleavage. She smelled of paint, turpentine and sweat. “He’s a good boy,” she said.
“I’m sorry to bring bad news.”
“It could be worse,” my mother said. She kept my face tight against her. My lips were parted by one of the Brooks Brothers buttons. It was as smooth and hard as a pebble.
“I’ll go now,” the Asturian said.
My mother released me.
“Let me check the hallway first,” she said and left us.
As soon as she was gone, he came over and whispered in English, “Your father gave me a message only for you. He said”—the Asturian paused, eyes on the ceiling, then recited the message— “‘Remember, Rafa, remember to yourself always, that you have the hard-headed common sense of the Nerudas. If trouble gets in your way, use your brain.’ No, no,” he corrected himself, “‘If trouble finds you, use your peasant brain.’” The Asturian tousled my hair, smiled and then rushed off after my mother in a comical way, a hurried waddle.
Of course I forgot my anger. When Ruth returned, I didn’t confront her about the ruination of my character. There was a calm look of concentration in her green eyes, a strange and beautiful contrast to the wild tangle of her black hair. Her posture, often defeated and wary since our return from Florida, was erect and alert. “He brought a letter from Daddy,” she said to me, but also not to me, speaking over my head and scanning the hallway intently, as if trying to decipher something on the wall. “He didn’t want me to read it to you, but I’m going to. I’m going to have to destroy it and I want you to know it really existed. It’s too important for you to believe on just my say-so.”
She had no letter that I could see. She walked up and down our little hall, first peering into my room, then the study. “No!” she said decisively. “Certainly not here.” She put a finger to her lips and said, “Keep quiet.” She wasn’t talking to me. She took my hand and led me into the bathroom. It’s a bathroom that I sometimes see when I visit friends on the Upper West Side. But that’s rare. Those who pay today’s prices for New York apartments usually replace the characteristic black and white web pattern of tiles, the milky porcelain sink and faucets, the toilet whose flush sounds like an explosion, and the narrow frosted glass window, permanently stuck in a position not fully closed, so that, especially on a winter night, a breeze shocks the bare behind of its user.
Ruth pushed our blood-red shower curtain open and bent down to turn on the bathtub faucet. A squeal, a shudder from the pipes, and then a burst of water made thunder. She moved to the sink and both its faucets were wrung open to add to the storm. She tried and failed to shut the frosted glass window. The split in my father’s shirt billowed as she did and I saw all of her skinny back. There was more than a single line on her; another intersected it. She had an X painted on her back as if she were a target. She finally settled on the closed toilet seat, reached into the deep pockets of my father’s chinos, and pulled out a letter written on two sheets of unlined yellow typing paper, a kind of cheap foolscap that I can no longer find in my local stationery store. Today the pages are so brittle that the edges break off if any pressure is applied. Looking at them as I write this I see that the coarse paper absorbed the blue ink of my father’s pen unevenly. Some words are fat, others faded, a few almost illegibly blurred. She patted the rim of the bathtub near her, inviting me to sit. I obeyed.
“‘My dear, sweet Ruth—’” she read in a cold matter-of-fact voice. Then she stopped and seemed to skip ahead. “Well, for a while he writes about how much he loves me,” she said and sighed, not with longing, but a kind of exhaustion. “Here, this is the part I want to read to you.” She was at the bottom of the first page. Its top drooped like a flag in a dying wind. “‘I dare not explain how I know about the danger I’m in, even though a reliable man will bring this letter to you. It is certain that the CIA is out to silence me. My life isn’t worth a nickel if I return. I have spoken with what they call in the spy movies a double agent and he showed me proof of exactly how determined the Kennedy administration is to prevent me from bringing home the truth about the Revolution.’” She looked at me. The utter loss in her eyes was scary. Her cheeks were hollows. “I’m sorry, Rafe,” she said in a mumble and lowered her gaze to the floor. She let out a huge sigh, an exhalation that was part moan. “We’re terrible parents,” she whispered and I heard tears in her voice, although there were none in her eyes.
“No, you’re not!” I answered as if a stranger had made the accusation. “I love you, Mommy,” I said. I reached for her right hand. The left one still held my fathers letter.
She squeezed my fingers for a second and then let go, sitting up to read from the second page of foolscap. “‘Obviously it would be crazy for you and Rafe to join me in Cuba. An attack could come at any time and should the U.S. bring all its forces to bear nothing could stop the devastation. I certainly don’t expect any mercy at their hands, not even for the innocents. You’re safer in New York. But still, I’m sorry to have to alarm you, and I don’t think you should repeat any of this to Rafael, but I’m convinced that you are in danger so long as you are associated with me. I’ve let it be known in Havana—especially in the presence of those I don’t trust—that our marriage is troubled and that you don’t care for my politics. If things become too uncomfortable for you, maybe you should consider talking to a lawyer about a divorce. Do whatever is necessary to make it seem we’re on the rocks. I know this is a hard thing to ask, but we’ve both known since Julius and Ethel the kind of people we’re up against, and certainly what happened in Tampa has proven they’ll stop at nothing. Don’t worry about me or the fate of the world—think of yourself and Rafe only. Pretend you’ve given it all up, especially politics. You should get a divorce—I’m sure an American court will grant it once you tell them where I’ve voluntarily chosen to live. Think of me as being in prison, a prison you can’t visit, but a prison from which I will soon be paroled, not broken, but stronger than ever. I couldn’t protect you and Rafe once. I must stay here to prevent you from being hurt again. I must stay here and help defend the Revolution. If Cuba goes, then true Socialism will exist nowhere. If it fails then I fail and I will be worthless to you and to myself. You know whom to contact to get a message to me. Be sure to destroy this. Hug and kiss Rafe for me. I don’t know if he’ll ever accept me as his father again. I hope to make it up to him someday. Without your love I am lost. Without the hope that I will see you both again, I am desolate. Un fuerte abrazo. Te amo.’” She recited his words in a consciously controlled tone, fighting her pain. As a result, she sounded angry. “That means, I love you,” she said in a grim tone.
“Daddy’s not coming home?” The rim of the tub was a precarious and uncomfortable seat. I braced myself with my hands. The porcelain was cool and massive. “Is that what it means?” I asked. I seemed to feel nothing. I know my mother expected me to be upset. Obviously, I didn’t really understand what was going on. “Use your peasant brain,” to choose just one example of my confusion, seemed like an insult to me. I understood peasants to be primitive people, only a cut above Cro-Magnon Man; indeed, peasants were less impressive since they were alive today, demonstrably inferior to other human beings, whereas Cro-Magnon was the peak of intelligence for his time. And what trouble was going to find me? More men who wanted to pee on my mother? Those terrifying Cuban anti-Communists (they were called by my father Gusanos, which means worms) and the CIA, deadly agents of the most powerful government on earth, were going to be defeated by an eight-year-old’s peasant brain? Or by my hard-headedness? And why was my father proud of our primitive ancestors? I didn’t want to emulate them: I wanted to be like him, a handsome intellectual.
But I knew even then, had known since that night in Tampa, that there was a part of Francisco I didn’t want in me, and I also believed, although I immediately shoved it out of sight, down below into
the damp and unlit basement, that his reason for staying in Cuba was more cowardice than self-sacrifice. I knew what I felt and believed and then in an instant, I never knew that I had ever thought such a thought. O, miracle of miracles from the creature that thinks: we move inexorably toward truth, and on arrival, shut our eyes.
“That’s what it means, honey,” my mother said. She had no warmth in her tone, hardly any coloration. She could have been a recorded phone company voice, explaining that the number was disconnected. “Daddy won’t be coming home for a while. But he’s fine and he loves us.” The letter went back into my father’s chinos. “Don’t be frightened,” she said and stood up. She extended her hand. “It’s bedtime.”
Oh no, I was certainly not going to be frightened. Of what? What was there to be frightened of?
Poor woman. She was lost. I took my mother’s hand. To me she was beauty, sustenance, comfort. Even in the torn shirt, with the target on her back, swimming in my father’s pants, I put my hand in hers with confidence.
My room had only the nude ceiling fixture, a triangle of three bulbs that spread a yellow light, a sickly glare, as if the sun were dying. Ruth had taken down my shelves of books, comics, baseball cards, and games in order to paint the walls blue. She had done one wall and then decided the color was wrong, that it ought to remain white as before. But it was still undone, since painting a room white bored her. I had one wall of blue, three of peeling yellowed white, and my possessions were in a disorganized heap, sometimes covered by a sheet and sometimes not, depending on whether Ruth had vowed that morning to do the job. I looked at this wreck while I undressed and Ruth turned down my bed. No wonder Mrs. Stein wouldn’t allow Joseph to play at my house. Maybe it had nothing to do with her nuttiness. Maybe it was us.
I had never seriously considered that we were the weirdos. Despite our political unorthodoxy, my father’s lack of a typical job, I had a heroic image of my parents and I trusted their assertion that I was strong, fast, smart and good. It was gracious on my part to be friendly to boys like Joseph, wasn’t it? But now, as I put on my faded Superman pajama bottoms (I didn’t wear a top), I saw that we were the oddballs. Everyone else was a happy American, not enemies of the government like us. Everyone else’s mother wore dresses and cooked dinners. Everyone else’s father went to work in the morning and came home at night to talk about the Yankees, not Dostoevsky or the Third International. I wasn’t the envy of my friends, the delight of my teachers, the wonderful exception. I was the unfortunate kid, the geek, surrounded not by genuine regard, but the kindness of pity.
Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil Page 9