As for Lucretia’s parents, Gabriel and Teresa, they stopped by regularly at the home in La Vibora to see their grandsons. Teresa begged her daughter to play a more crucial role in her children’s upbringing, but Lucretia resorted to complaints that she was busy with work, and besides, she said, “The boys are fine with Cuca. They love her.”
“Still, they are getting older, and you don’t want to miss anything along the way.”
“Es muy tarde,” Lucretia asserted.
“Oh, my dear daughter. It’s never too late. I don’t understand you.”
“Please, mamá. The boys are fine.”
As for the brothers, they loved to hear their Abuelo Gabriel’s stories of his seafaring adventures before coming to Cuba, and he never failed to embellish his tales with new and exciting details about his days on the vast ocean, the years before Teresa put an anchor on his heart and he settled thereafter in Cuba. The story the boys loved most involved Gabriel’s shipwreck and rescue in the South Pacific. Every other Sunday night, they sat on the carpeted floor with their legs crossed and listened to their Abuelo recall the tale.
Gabriel cleared his throat, wet his lips with his tongue, and then began: “My crew and I left the Philippines and headed south towards New Guinea when a surprise wind, a violent gale wind, gathered up force and tore the mast right from our ship. I tell you, it just cracked off like a weak branch from a tree.” He brought his hands together to demonstrate breaking a twig in half. “We were pushed south without a choice. The waves were fierce blue giants slapping against our bows, and the winds became cables pulling us without mercy into sharp coral reefs. We could see these tiny spots of land in the distance, so once our ship punctured and started taking in water, we had to abandon her. We fitted into several dinghies and rowed with all our strength towards the islands, but the waters snapped our oars and overturned our little boats. Several of my men I never saw again, but the rest of us reached within ourselves and found a will to live, and so we swam like fish against the currents trying to carry us out to sea. We struggled for hours as the wind whipped at our heads and the waves crashed over us. Each breath was a miracle, but by the morning we had somehow washed up on the shore, tired and battered with cuts and bruises. Of the three dozen men with me on my ship, only a dozen had their lives spared by the mere grace of God.”
Gabriel took a sigh and stared at his grandsons, both Juan and Alberto alert with wide eyes, awaiting the rest of Abuelo’s tale.
“Yet our struggle was only beginning. We had nothing to eat, and we were tired with fatigue so severe that it could just as easily have killed us. Luckily, the little island we were on had coconuts, and over the course of the next week, we spotted canoes in the waters off the shore. For several days, the natives were afraid to approach us, but finally a group of youngsters, no older than the two of you, had the courage to come ashore.” Gabriel pointed and smiled at his grandsons. “We didn’t speak their language, but they could see we were shipwrecked. The flotsam and wreckage from our ship by this time had started washing up on shore.
“The young native boys, Biuku and Eroni—I’ll never forget their names—they saved my life and the rest of my crew. They took a message we wrote on a dried-out scrap of paper to their leader. The chief ordered a rescue with several canoes. We eventually made it to New Zealand where we boarded an Eastern European liner, and a month later we were back in England. After six months of rest, I became restless again and bought a new ship. I gathered a crew. Many were my old sea mates who survived the ordeal. They joined up again, and by 1916 I was back on the ocean, away from the great war ravishing Europe. By that summer I was here in Cuba meeting your Abuela Teresa. But I will always remember those two little boys from the Solomon Islands, Biuku and Eroni. No older than you two, they saved my life.”
* * *
Chapter 6
Hearing Abuelo Gabriel tell the story of his survival usually induced magical dreams for Juan. As he fell asleep, he imagined himself atop a deck, his ship rocking gently in a breeze, the mist full of salt from the sea assaulting his senses, the opulent waters like a spell of awaiting adventures. He was a captain like his grandfather. And in his dream, the breeze became a wicked storm that reared up and wrecked his vessel, forcing Juan to become the hero. He dragged his shipmates by their clothes with his teeth as he swam to a small island. Once safely ashore, other scenes in his dreams played out. Juan would tend to the wounds of his crew, gather coconuts for food and nurse them to health, and swim back into the strait looking to flag a rescue boat. He often woke with an energy that filled his heart with hope.
But during the week that his paternal grandparents, Huberto and Evelina, boarded the ferry to go live in Miami, Juan’s dreams of miraculous survival at sea produced nightmares instead of heroics. The night after they left for America, Juan woke sopping with sweat in the middle of a dream where he nearly drowned in raging waters that swept him out to the vast ocean. He clung only to a sodden plank of his ship’s wreckage. For days after those troubling dreams, Juan felt fatigued as though illness lurked, about to snatch him under.
Sickness finally did strike the second week after Huberto and Evelina had left for America. Juan started a fever and vomited one morning as he sat in class at Santa Dominicana, his upper-level elementary school. After Lucretia and Cuca went to the school to pick him up in the family’s baby blue Oldsmobile 88 Sedan, Lucretia dropped her son and nanny back off at the house in La Vibora and then sped away to La Iglesia de Jesus de Miramar to locate Father Ballesteros. She returned in a frenzy a half hour later with a freshly-christened bottle of holy water.
While Lucretia was gone, Cuca removed Juan’s shoes and helped him into his bed, where he crawled under the clean sheets she’d put there that morning. She then dampened a towel with cold spigot water and folded it into a compress to apply to Juan’s forehead. She knelt to brush away his bangs and apply the towel’s coolness. Next, she grounded down two aspirins using the back of a spoon and stirred pinches of cloves, yarrow, and ginseng with flakes of boxwood leaves into a cup of mango juice. She held the glass for Juan to sip the concoction. Finally, she phoned Florencio to report that Juan was running a high temperature and developing a rash. Upon receiving the news, Florencio rushed out of his office at the Royal Bank building to be at Juan’s bedside. He gauged his son’s fever with the palm of his hand against Juan’s cheek and saw that Juan’s eyes glazed over with tiredness. “He’s mucho calor, very hot,” said Florencio.
“Mi lengua,” Juan moaned, and he slowly opened his mouth to show Cuca and his father how his tongue had turned a blistering red. As he leaned forward to show them, Juan’s tired eyes drifted to the doorway where he noticed his mother lurking. She was an effigy in the shadows of the hall, the newly-blessed bottle of holy water in her hand, a rosary around her neck. In his fever-induced haze, Juan wanted to reach out for her, hear her whisper his name, but as he blinked she disappeared, a waif down the hall.
Even as Juan lay feverish and dizzy, he thought of his mother, how she seemed never to care about him or Alberto unless they fell ill, such as now. Then she resorted to her strange behavior, summoning God’s curative powers through the divinity she believed had been ordained to her in the holy water. She tossed drops everywhere as if they were an antidote against the contagion. Why, he wondered, does she give herself to God, when she should be lavishing her love on me? Why won’t she come to my bedside, kneel next to me, whisper love songs in my ear, caress my throbbing brow the way Cuca and father do? Why does she, instead, stay shielded in the shadows of the doorway, sprinkling the blessed water of God, as if that could be all that is necessary to knock out the sickness plaguing me?
When Dr. Muñoz arrived at the Ramos’s house, he opened his medic’s case, pulled out a stethoscope, and checked Juan’s heart rate. He examined his reddened tongue and used a tongue depressor to view his swollen tonsils. He then rubbed his lymph nodes. Before speaking, he ran his hand through his mountainous hair and then scratched at
an itch on his hairy forearm.
“It’s definitely scarlet fever,” said the doctor to Florencio and Cuca, both at Juan’s bedside. “Do not be alarmed, however, if the rash covers his body, his chest, arms, legs, and even his groin area. He’ll need to stay in bed, separated from everyone else and take plenty of liquids—soups and juices. Also, I’ll leave you penicillin tablets. He’s to take them twice a day. He should start to improve within forty-eight hours. In the meantime, this infection is very contagious. You’ll need to inform your wife,” the doctor addressed Florencio, “that the school she runs here at the house should be closed for several days. And this place should be scoured.”
The next day, Lucretia closed the school and hired a cleaning crew to scrub every floor and surface in the La Vibora house. She had the curtains washed and the carpets and rugs shampooed. Meanwhile, Cuca and Florencio sat at Juan’s side and fed him spoonfuls of chicken broth. Later, Cuca gave him pulpy orange juice with sprinkles of hawthorn, yarrow, and boxwood mixed in. With the help of the penicillin, on the second day Juan’s fever broke, his tongue stopped swelling, and he headed towards recovery before his rash reddened too brightly.
Just as Juan began to feel better, Alberto vomited his dinner that evening, and his fever shot up to one-hundred and three. Cuca gave him two and a half grounded aspirins with boxwood, cloves, hawthorn, yarrow, and ginseng stirred into mango juice while waiting for Dr. Muñoz to return.
Lucretia cried that the cleaning crew had been a waste of money and that somebody, Ay Dios mío, must do something to prevent the contagion from spreading. From inside his room, his covers pulled up to his chin, Juan felt a sullenness pull at his heartstrings as he listened to the echoes of his mother’s words—about money, about herself. Still damp with fever, his eyes moistened with tears of sadness. He knew Cuca and his father would be back to check on him after they attended to Alberto. Pobrecito, his poor brother was now sick too, he thought, and my mother won’t dare to spend a second at his or my side. He fell asleep dreaming of her uttering his name from her forbidden lips.
With Cuca and his father attending to his fever, Alberto also wondered why his mother chose to stand in the doorway to his room, not entering—only hiding as if spying in the shadows, tossing holy water, rubbing her rosary, crossing herself, whispering hosannas—when all he wanted was for her to crumble at his bedside and hold his hand back to health. In his delirium of wondering why she did not do what he wished for, he thought he heard her call his name, a gentle whisper, but he was certain he heard it: “Alberto.” Again, “Alberto.” Yes, he was positive of what he heard because he saw both his father and Cuca turn their heads to the doorway, towards Lucretia, now disappeared, a phantom down the hall.
When Dr. Muñoz arrived to check Alberto, he thanked Cuca for counteracting the younger brother’s high fever with her aspirin and herbal juice mix. The doctor then decided to give Alberto an injection of penicillin to alleviate his temperature. As the medicine took effect, it gave him convulsions. He wheezed and his eyes rolled back in their sockets. He shook and squirmed in his bed. “Alberto,” Cuca called his name and held him tight, but he did not respond, unknowing if it was Cuca or his mother who whispered his name. Florencio began to fret with worries for the first time. He blamed himself for not being around more, for not devoting himself to being a better father. With Alberto finally sleeping, he went back to check on Juan, who had also fallen into a peaceful slumber.
Hours later, just as Juan had looked on the road to recovery, a pomegranate-red rash began to spread over his chest and abdomen. The skin all over his body became covered in goosebumps. He cried that he ached all over and that his head felt as though it were split open like a chopped-up melon. Cuca and Florencio rushed back and forth between the boys, giving them Cuca’s concoctions and the penicillin from Dr. Muñoz.
“Me voy a morir. I’m going to die,” cried Juan.
“Juan, do not say such things. When you’re well again, playing baseball, you will not remember these days. I promise,” said Cuca.
With Cuca and Florencio tending to the boys’ needs morning, noon, and night, the fever that racked their bodies finally subsided. The redness canvassing their chests and backs slowly faded, and by the end of the next week their sandpaper rashes turned into what looked like badly peeling sunburns. The boys’ skin inherited a natural tan as they watched the tips of their fingers and toes shed flakes of dead skin, their bodies demonstrating how to force out an illness to the very tips of their extremities.
Dr. Muñoz made daily visits, and each time he made sure the right dosage of penicillin was administered to the boys. Even after they had wrestled the upper hand of the infection out of their systems, the doctor asked Cuca to continue giving them her herbal concoction.
“I know you two are feeling better, but you need to rest,” the doctor said to the brothers. “Una semana, one more week in bed, and then you can regain your daily activities.”
After closing his medicine bag, he met in private with Florencio. “I tell you, the boys pulled through fine. But I did have a moment of worry. I sensed Juan possibly slipping towards rheumatic fever, which could have caused a heart ailment or kidney inflammation. But I do not see any signs it got that far, neither with Alberto. Cuca was right with giving them her concoctions. But I want you to get them out in el sol, the direct sun, somewhere closer to the beach, away from this environment where germs may linger.”
“Certainly, doctor,” said Florencio. “And thank you, even if my wife tends to forget.”
“Es mi trabajo,” said the doctor.
Es mi trabajo. Days later, Florencio was still repeating that idea in his mind. It is my job. To be a good father, that is my job. As it is Lucretia’s job to be a good mother. Nothing else should displace that importance. Yet his work, he knew, had not made his fatherhood a model for imitation. As for Lucretia’s antics, what could he do? He began to weep.
A week later, after tossing the baseball back and forth to each other in the backyard, where the sun turned the trees and houses into bronze, the Ramos brothers came into the kitchen for a drink. From the cool turquoise shade of the shadows, their father did not hear them enter. They, however, could hear him weeping.
* * *
Chapter 7
The next day, Florencio discussed with Lucretia the doctor’s suggestion of sending Juan and Alberto away from the house for a few weeks to be completely removed from any last strain of germs clinging to the walls of su casa. Lucretia was ecstatic with the plan and wasted no time notifying Cuca that Florencio would pay for train tickets for her to take a trip with the boys back to her hometown village on the northeastern coast of Cuba. Her family’s home was not far from the beautiful Playa Guardalavaca, where the boys would be able to soak up as much sun on the white sands as possible, part of Dr. Muñoz’s advice for ridding their systems of any stubborn aftereffects of the scarlet fever infection.
As Cuca helped the boys pack for their travels, Florencio thought several times to bring up the issue with Lucretia of how oddly she had acted when their sons were ill. Each time he prepared his words, he pulled back, not wanting another of her tantrums to ensue as a result of confronting her. As long as things were fine, Lucretia would not act up. Why bring up what’s over, he concluded, only think to the future with a positive outlook. The boys’ excitement for the trip to Guardalavaca quickly became his focus.
In 1952, Guardalavaca was a quiet town of unpaved, pebbled streets and tiny brick homes with thatched roofs. The city was not far from Birán and the grand estate of Angel Castro, Fidel’s father, the self-made landowner of an entire village of obreros, one worker of which was Cuca’s father, Fernando Rivera. Birán was also the birthplace of both Fidel and Raúl, the brothers who had dreams of glory far beyond the rural farmhouses and tiendas that their father, Angel, built from dust into his landowning empire.
The first week of July, Juan and Alberto each packed a suitcase for their extended stay in Guardalavaca with Cuca an
d her family. On the evening before they left, lightning flickered and made the sky glimmer like a movie screen before the thundershowers came down in fierce, lean drops pattering everything like conga drums. The next morning after the cloudburst, the neighborhood was sopped with moisture and the skies remained overcast, but Lucretia’s spirits were high. She gave the boys quick kisses on each side of their cheeks and then saw them into the family Oldsmobile, their baby blue 88 Sedan with its big bug-eyed headlights and a front grille that looked as if it was an open mouth. Lucretia waved goodbye quickly before hurrying back inside to start a bubble bath to prepare for a long day ahead of shopping in La Havana Vieja. This left Florencio to drive his sons and Cuca to Havana’s principal train station, Estación Central, where they boarded a seven o’clock locomotive routed across the breadth of the island to Holguín in the east, the town where Cuca’s parents would meet her and the boys and take them to Guardalavaca.
Florencio gave his sons long hugs, and then held each of them by the shoulders and stared into their eyes before letting them climb the iron step ladder into the train’s cab. He told them how much he loved them, and then shed a tear as they found their seats and waved through the window as the conductor sounded the whistle and the train chugged out of the station. Plumes of cottony white and gray smoke formed a wispy tail in the humid air. In their excitement to be going on a traveling adventure, the brothers had a hard time understanding why their father looked so sad as he stood on the wooden platform of the station until the train disappeared into the sweltering Cubano heat of midsummer.
The Ramos Brothers Trust Castro and Kennedy Page 4