“You know a lot about it,” I said.
“It’s what I want to do. I want to study computer science in university.” Tania glanced at me uncertainly, as if I might find the idea ridiculous.
I only asked, “In Havana?”
“There or . . .” Tania shrugged. “Yeah, I guess in Havana.”
I wondered what she had been going to say.
“That’s why I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “My dad said you’re a computer genius.”
I felt a flush coming on. The last time anyone had called me a computer genius was when Aunt Lavinia asked me to “install the Facebook” for her.
“I run a pretty popular website,” I said.
“What’s it called?” Tania asked.
“CatoTrope. It’s a content aggregator. About, like, funny cat pictures and stuff.”
“Oh.” After a moment, Tania added, “That’s cool.”
“There are some really interesting technical challenges,” I hastened to say. “Content crowdsourcing, popularity algorithms, cloud storage . . .”
“Maybe you can take a look at my website,” Tania said. “I’m writing one in HTML, for our casa.”
I couldn’t imagine what it would be like, trying to learn web design with hardly any access to, well, the web. “Sure, I’ll help.”
“I have this layout issue,” Tania said as we returned to the city center.
We sat down amidst the crowd on the wide stone steps by the church. The band played old bittersweet boleros—“Silencio” and “Herido de Sombras” and “Siento La Nostalgia de Palmeras.” Tania and I talked HTML, PHP, and JavaScript.
It was easy, talking to Tania. Most cute girls had this remarkable ability to tie my tongue in knots. But when Tania looked me in the eyes, it was a sort of simple, earnest gaze that put me at ease. Until I started wondering—as I talked about the best commenting practices—what it would be like to take her hand and pull her close and kiss her—
At which point I stopped talking midsentence. Because I’d remembered Ana, with a sudden lurching coldness in my chest.
“What’s wrong?” Tania asked.
I still would have liked to kiss her. But I could tell that it was only a physical desire. With that coldness inside me, there wasn’t room for anything else.
So what? Yosvany’s voice sounded in my head. Just go for it.
I got to my feet instead. “I remembered that I need your help. There’s this friend who lives in town. I have to figure out how to get to his address.”
“Oh.” Tania followed me up after a moment. “What is it?”
I gave her the address Rafaela had written down for me.
“It’s a few streets over,” Tania said. “I’ll show you.”
I could tell she was still nonplussed, though.
Ricardo’s house was near the local Casa de la Música. But when we found the right building, it was a puzzle. There was no entry door, only a large green wooden gate. It was closed, with a sign above that said Galería painted in ragged white letters.
Tania looked at the sign dubiously. “Is your friend an artist?”
“He’s a poet,” I said.
“Should we try knocking?”
I looked at the door for a lingering moment. Behind it lived a man who was a living connection to Mom’s secret past.
“I’ll come back when the gallery’s open,” I said.
“You didn’t tell me much about New York,” Tania said on the way back to her house.
“Sorry.”
“Maybe we can do another walk tomorrow.” She smiled at me.
“Yes,” I said. “Maybe.”
Then cursed myself for hesitating.
chapter nineteen
POET OF THE REVOLUTION
The next morning after breakfast I ambled over to Ricardo’s house. I ambled because my stomach was stuffed with crepes, honey, and fruit, and because the sun beat down ferociously on the stone cobbles of the old town, and most of all because I wasn’t sure I was ready to face Mom’s old boyfriend.
I mean, there I was—Rick Gutiérrez, purveyor of cat pictures—about to meet a revolutionary poet. A man once threatened with prison for his art. Okay, so he gave in and joined the army and left Mom hanging, but even so. Ricardo Eugenio Echeverría López had been an artist.
I stood before that large green gate again, now open. Within was a typical Cuban street gallery. Whitewashed walls set off colorful canvases mounted on simple wooden panels.
I saw no one inside. A beaded curtain concealed a doorway deeper into the house.
I hesitated, then entered the gallery.
The paintings were colorful and slapdash, thrown together by a careless hand. The subject matter: old American cars and old men smoking cigars. Also, old men smoking cigars while seated in old American cars. Just like every other gallery in Cuba, except I saw no picture of La Bodeguita del Medio, Hemingway’s famous hangout in Havana.
No, there it was—a small square, squeezed in a corner in the back. The proportions of the facade were off. I guessed the artist had never actually seen the Bodeguita.
I bit my lip, a vague sense of dismay scratching at me. This didn’t seem like the right kind of place for Ricardo.
“Yes, friend?” came a voice from behind me. “You like? I paint it myself.”
A man had emerged from the curtained doorway. A pudgy, white, sleepy-looking face. Bald on top, gray stubble on the sides. A solid beer belly protruded from the man’s faded green polo shirt. His trousers were a fashion statement—bright red sweatpants with a white stripe down the middle.
“I’m only looking,” I said, in Spanish.
The man’s shoulders slumped. “Okay.”
“I was told that Ricardo Eugenio Echeverría lives here,” I said.
A faint frown clouded the man’s face. “You need something from me?”
Really? This guy?
“I . . . I heard you’re a poet,” I said.
For a moment, there was a stillness. Ricardo stared at me across the length of the gallery.
Then he rushed at me. One, two, three giant steps and he towered over me. I stumbled back into the wall but he kept going, his arms rising—
He stopped. Snapped to a halt as if he’d smacked into a wall Wile E. Coyote–style.
“Que pinga tú quieres?” he forced out, the crude words little more than a whisper.
“I’m Rick Gutiérrez, from New York,” I said. “The son of María Gutiérrez Peña.”
Ricardo took one single, heavy step back. His eyes never moved from me. “María . . .”
“You remember her?”
“I was a poet,” Ricardo said. “Once.” He turned away, an abrupt motion. “These days I paint. Cars and stuff. It’s much easier. They pay you too.”
He went to the largest painting in the gallery, a picture of a young Fidel munching on a giant cigar, green cap on his head. For a long time he stared at the picture.
“I wrote a few poems recently,” he said then. “Would you like to read one?”
“Yes, please.”
A shiver passed over me. For the first time in my life, I was excited about reading a poem.
Ricardo dragged closed the gallery’s gates, leaving us in gloom. He slid the bolt home, then—a vague shape in the dark—headed for the beaded curtain in the back. “Come.”
We passed through a dusty storeroom, then crossed a narrow patio open to the sky. A few cracked clay flowerpots lay on the faded tiles, filled with black earth. At the end of the patio there was a door missing, replaced by an off-white blanket hung from a rope. Ricardo pushed it aside to reveal a bedroom.
The room smelled of paint and cigarettes and mold. Yellow-brown rust streaks marred the walls. A wooden roof sloped overhead, the beams dark with rot. The bed was a narrow mattress, patterned with flowers—I could just about tell they had originally been blue.
I couldn’t imagine living in this place.
Ricardo bent down by the bed and pulled
out a round metal tin, the kind Danish butter cookies come in. He put it on the mattress and lifted off the top. It contained sheaves and sheaves of paper, thrown together in a chaotic mess. Pages torn from notebooks, paper tissues, printer paper, newsprint—all covered in handwriting.
Ricardo fished around, pulled out a notebook page that had been folded over several times. He unfolded it and handed it to me.
Ricardo’s handwriting was spidery but clean, easy to read—it seemed like it didn’t belong on the crumpled, off-white page. His poem had but ten lines. I scanned them once, quickly, then passed over them again, searching for hidden meaning.
It was simple, that poem, the words graceful but straightforward. They spoke of an evening in Trinidad. A tired man returning home, walking down cobbled streets, the setting sun warm on his face. He listened to some tourists argue with a taxi driver. He thought of the coffee he’d make himself when he got home. He caught the scent of orange blossoms in the air. It reminded him of his youth spent on the Isle of Pines. He smiled.
That was it. No revolution. No politics at all, nor even love or passion. Just a nostalgic trinket. A tourist piece, like the paintings in the gallery.
“It’s nice.” I handed the page back to Ricardo.
“Nice.” He nodded. “Yes. It is nice.” He watched me, as if expecting more.
“Well.” I wondered what else I could say. “What was my mother like, back when you knew her?”
“I have to open the gallery,” Ricardo said, and put aside his tin of poems.
I followed him back to the front. He opened the gallery to the street and leaned on the doorjamb, watching the tourists outside. “My friends,” he called to an older couple who looked like American tourists. “Come in. Where are you from?”
I turned away from him. Made to go.
I’d taken a few steps down the street when Ricardo spoke up. “María,” he said. “How is she?”
I looked back at him. He stood in the door, staring at the street as if he hadn’t spoken at all. As if it had been some disembodied voice that had asked the question.
“Mom died two years ago,” I said.
I thought he might flinch, turn away, maybe even cry. But nothing shifted on that soft, pudgy face. Those distant eyes, they never even blinked.
In the afternoon I helped Tania with the website for her family’s casa—photos, room rates, a map, that sort of thing. We sat on her massive iron-framed bed, our backs against the headboard, and worked on her beat-up brick of a laptop. The door to the living room was open, but my skin tingled with the warmth of her presence. Every time her elbow brushed against mine, I thought I might bite my tongue.
I’d met geeky girls before, but none who listened to me like Tania did. She seemed to really believe I had something intelligent to say. So of course the most intelligent observation I made all morning was that she could include a cat picture on her site.
“Oh, that’s nice,” she said.
Okay, so the idea wasn’t as stupid as I made it sound. Tania did have a cat, a cute gray creature that spent its days curled up on the roof, except when it was time to trip up some tourist lugging his suitcase across the patio. And people do like cat pictures with their browsing experience. But it was hardly the contribution you’d expect from a computer genius.
Tania didn’t seem to mind. “That was good work,” she said while we snacked on fruta bomba and fried bananas in the kitchen. “Want to go to the beach?”
Playa Ancon was a long beach ten minutes outside town, sandwiched between the water and a string of hotels. As we got off the bus a salty breeze swept over us, refreshing after days of stifling heat. We kicked off our sandals and walked along the fine white sand. The Caribbean rolled tranquilly against the shore, clear and blue.
We dropped our things in the shade of a tall palm tree and changed with towels wrapped around us. And, well . . . Tania in a swimsuit . . .
I hurried into the water to cool down. She came in after me. I tried to not stare too much at the way the water made her skin glisten. We swam in the shallows and splashed at each other and laughed.
Later we lay in the sun, slathered in sunscreen, listening to Mayito Rivera on the tinny speakers of my iPod. The wind brushed lightly across my skin and a languor filled me. I could have lain there forever. Except at one point the breeze carried some flowery scent to me, and that made me wonder.
“What do orange blossoms smell like?”
Tania shrugged. My eyes were closed, but I sensed the shift of her shoulders on the sand. “Why?”
I told her about Ricardo’s poem. “That guy was my mother’s boyfriend, back in the day,” I said. “He was supposedly this great poet, but I wasn’t impressed.”
Tania was quiet for a long time. So long I thought she might have fallen asleep. But when I opened my eyes to look at her I found her up on one elbow, looking thoughtful.
“You know the other name for the Isle of Pines?” she asked. “Isla de la Juventud?”
The Isle of Youth . . . that sounded familiar.
Oh.
A coldness passed over me. The Isle of Pines had been too commonplace a name to stick in my mind, but now I remembered. It was the place where Fidel had been imprisoned after his first failed attempt at revolution.
Later, once he finally succeeded, it was the counterrevolutionaries who got sent there.
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Tania said, “but I asked my father about your friend. Ricardo. Before he moved into that house, he spent twenty years in prison.”
I frowned, working through the numbers. “That can’t be right.” According to Rafaela, Ricardo had joined the army in 1980—right before Mom left the island.
But that poem. A youth spent on the Isle of Pines.
Twenty years . . .
As a cat video tycoon, I have long been fascinated with the power of a good title. The video is important, but even a brilliant video won’t get shares if the title doesn’t get clicked in the first place.
“Funny Cat Moment”? That’s all right, you’ll get a few clicks.
“Cat in a Shark Costume Chases a Duck While Riding a Roomba”? That’s viral crack.
The video never changed. The outcome couldn’t be more different.
It’s like that with people too. Take Ricardo, for example.
Label him “failed poet who makes third-rate copies of second-rate paintings”? It’s sad, but you don’t exactly want to hang out with him.
Call him “freed prisoner of conscience who pens poems of defiance while disguised as a painter”? Now that’s someone you want to get to know.
Makes you wonder who else you’ve met in your life and never realized.
“I’d like to read more of your poems.”
Ricardo didn’t seem surprised to see me. He’d nodded when I came in, expressionless, and he nodded again at my request. He wore the same clothes from yesterday, and I got the impression he would again tomorrow.
He seemed perfectly at ease in this dinky gallery with his dinky paintings. But I had my suspicions now.
We retreated into the back and he brought out his cookie tin of poems. He didn’t ask what kind of poem I wanted to read, but shuffled through the mess of pages and pulled out one, two, three of them.
“When I was younger, I wrote for others,” Ricardo said. “These I wrote for myself. But if you’re María’s son . . .”
Ricardo’s poems were simple. An ode to an evening spent sipping coffee on the porch. Five stanzas on a trip to the local agricultural market, people and tomatoes alike wilting in the afternoon heat. A portrait of the pregoneros, the street vendors who rumbled past your window in the morning, singing out the virtues of their goods.
They were simple things, Ricardo’s poems, but that wasn’t all they were. That man on the porch with his coffee, he saw the neighbor lady watching, one who had all the right friends and none of the wrong ones, and wondered what story she’d tell of him. At the agricultural market, as he weighed his
scant purchases, he saw yumas pile fresh tomatoes and bananas and fruta bomba in their bags with careless indifference. And the cries of the pregoneros, they mixed with the solemn songs of children from the school next door. Pioneros singing praise to Che Guevara—their voices high and clear and free of doubts.
After some time I looked up from the pages in my hand. Ricardo stood before me with that metal tin in his hands, watching me. He hadn’t moved since I started reading. He wore no expression, his face the sort of blank you can only achieve intentionally.
“You didn’t join the army in ’80, did you?” I asked.
He kept quiet for such a long time I thought perhaps he’d lost his hold on the present moment. “No.”
“But the letter you wrote my mother—”
“How well did you know her?”
“She was my mother.”
“And?”
Annoyance washed through me. “I knew her longer than you did, that’s for sure.”
Ricardo nodded, even, calm. “What would she have done if she knew I was in prison? Would she have left for Miami?”
I tried to picture it. Mom getting on a boat at the Mariel Harbor, knowing someone she loved sat behind bars on the Isle of Pines.
“She wouldn’t even let Dad go to the dentist alone,” I said. “She told me love meant being there for someone.”
Ricardo’s face twitched. I realized mentioning Dad hadn’t been the smartest thing. But he said, “She would have wasted years fighting her father and the government and everybody. She might have ended up in jail herself. She didn’t deserve that. That wasn’t her dream.”
“Her dream?”
Ricardo sat down on the edge of his bed. Gazed at the wall beside me. “Her father thought that I convinced her to leave for Miami. It was the other way around. I wanted to stay, to write my poems, to fight. She told me our voices would be louder in Miami. She’d write a novel of Cuba, and I’d write my poems, and we’d change the world.” Ricardo laughed, a humorless sound. “She convinced me the world needed my poems.”
“So you lied to her,” I said. “You made her believe you were betraying her.”
“She left, didn’t she?”
“She never wrote that novel,” I said. “She never wrote a single story after she left, as far as I know.”
The Cat King of Havana Page 17