If they shared love on the first day, it was the kind of love where friendship and attraction entwined. Friendship because they shared a similar interest in music; attraction because they liked each other beyond the music.
And so from that day forward, every afternoon was occupied for Alberto. It actually seemed a blessing that catechism tied up his older brother along with Benito and Miguel. He needed time to spend with Emilia. She needed songs to sing. He had no trouble writing lyrics. Her voice was that of a swallow. He was getting better on the guitar. So every day, either she would come to his house or he would go to hers. He wrote up verses for her. She practiced singing them with a melody, stressing syllables and bringing emotion to the words. As he listened to her voice croon and crescendo, he strummed out accompanying chords on his acoustic. Their hours together were fun and joyful, creative and caring. And as the days became weeks and the weeks became months, they ended each night looking one another in the eyes until she made the first move, leaning in quick and planting her puckered-out lips on his. He closed his eyes as he saw her tilt forward. He relaxed his lips and let the cinnamon color of hers spark him with sweetness. The first time a little wet peck, but each day that followed a little better. He was in love.
“Alberto’s got a girlfriend,” Juan announced at the dinner table one night in late May, a rare occasion when the entire family ate together.
“I do not,” said Alberto, dropping his fork on his plate.
“You’re over at Emilia’s todos los días,” Juan teased.
“What else am I supposed to do? You guys have to study for catechism.”
“Yeah, but you’d rather spend your time with her over me and Benito and Miguel.”
Alberto wanted to defend himself when their father spoke up. “Juan, leave your brother alone. He and Emilia like music. It’s good that Alberto has someone to practice his music with.”
Out of nowhere, Alberto asked, “Papá, can I get a new guitar?”
His father finished chewing a piece of his steak. “I think your grades have been good. So yes, I think that sounds like a good idea.”
“What about me? I’m the one estudiando mucho?” cried Juan. “What do I get?”
Their father rested his fork on the side of his plate and used his napkin to wipe off his mouth. “Well, I guess this is a good time to tell you about my surprise.”
The brothers looked at each other and then in unison back at their father.
Their mother hadn’t yet said anything before she uttered, “What surprise, Florencio?”
She went on chewing vigorously on her steak as she always did, trying to outlast everyone, one bite at a time.
“After Juan’s confirmation, to celebrate, I’m taking the whole family to Mexico for vacación, to visit the ancient Mayan ruins, some of history’s greatest architectural achievements.”
“Florencio, you know I won’t be able to go. I have the salon and the school.”
“Then don’t go,” he said, not looking at her while picking up his fork to finish his meal. “I’ll take the boys. How’s that sound, hijos?”
Juan was elated and shouted, “Bien! Good!” Alberto only smiled. The trip sounded adventurous, but he could think of nothing else except Emilia. Oh, the way Emilia would sing when he played a new guitar.
A week later, his father kept his word and took Alberto into Havana Vieja to the city’s largest music store and let him pick out any acoustic guitar he wanted. He chose one made of hickory with a modest price tag. With new instrumentation in hand, he and Emilia rose to inspired levels of songwriting. Over the next month, their songs took shape with more texture and rhythm. They wrote and sang about Cuba and its history and about its current craziness and the heating up of politics again after Fidel and his brother Raúl—along with Benito’s father, Max, and several other prisoners—had been recently released from prison as part of a general amnesty granted by Batista. Not long after the rebels’ much-publicized release, a series of bombs went off around Havana. Everyone gossiped about possible suspects. Batista’s grip on power was once again slipping. He began to censor publications that ran Fidel’s columns. He banned Fidel from speaking on the airwaves and forbade students from gathering at his speeches. An open secret began spreading that Batista had hired assassins to pick off Fidel. The authorities also began to arrest people on suspicion of rebel activity. What would happen to Batista’s regime? Who would challenge him? Where was Fidel? Rumor was that he had fled with his brother Raúl in exile to Mexico. What did the future hold? Alberto tried to capture the unrest in one of his best choruses:
The city goes crazy
But I still have my baby
The people go nuts
But we ignore their stuff
When a bomb blows up
I’m gonna hold you with all my love
So as the rival power brokers sent shutters and spasms of frenzy through the city, its citizens tried to go about their daily business. Lucretia reared her focus on her salon. Florencio kept up late nights at the office and at Mujeres Siempre. Alberto spent time with Emilia. And Juan completed catechism.
By the middle of June, Brother Marco scheduled the last Sunday of the month as the day for the students at San Mateo to receive their confirmation. It was the one Sunday the brothers ever remembered when their father went to church with them. He dressed up in his finest navy blue silk suit with a butterfly tie. He walked with them to Jesus de Miramar, its steeple high as a pinnacle. He sat up straight in the pew with a glow of pride emanating from his high forehead and sleek hair. He had tears in his eyes as he watched his oldest son stand before Father Ballesteros and receive the subtle slap on the cheek, the tender smack that bound his son with Christ. He felt so happy. He gave everyone hugs. He took them out for helado, ice cream. Afterward they went to the park and played baseball, just like old times. Lucretia came along. She smiled and cheered when the boys hit the ball. The family was together. That night everyone was tired.
The next day, the brothers left with their father on a boat from Havana Harbor to Mexico. Alberto felt sadness in his heart that morning. It was his first time away from Emilia since they met. He didn’t know you could miss someone so much, even if he’d be back in a week.
* * *
Chapter 14
Their ocean liner cut through the Caribbean and headed southwest along the curvature of Cuba’s northern coastline of Pinar del Río province. Out at sea the waters rippled and sparkled the color of emeralds and sapphires while the lazy clouds turned the sky into a valley of white stones. When the liner reached the western tip of the island, it shot directly south into the gulf. When they lost sight of land, Juan mused about the many adventures his Abuelo Gabriel had once endeavored upon and how many times he must have stood on the deck of his ship in the middle of the ocean and looked out at the flatness of the water—its gleaming surface, how it looked to pour off the edge of the horizon—and contemplated loneliness as an anthem of freedom, for the ocean’s immensity was an unconquerable liberation, yet Gabriel had overcome its breadth each time and reached shore, even after his near-death experience in the Solomon Islands. For the brothers, their short, uneventful voyage, however, took up only part of the day, so they arrived on the Yucatán coast in early evening, a chilly wind besetting upon them.
Juan, Alberto, and their father wore sweaters as they disembarked from the ship and took a taxi to their hotel in Chichén Itzá. They took a light dinner and afterwards turned in for the night to start off fresh in the morning.
They woke early the next day and took a sightseeing bus with dozens of other pilgrims to the first sight of their trip, the ruins of El Castillo. The brothers walked around the beautiful pyramid-like structure made of stone and climbed one of the four stairways, which ascended each of the facades. They descended another facade and counted the nine concentric levels that comprised the pyramid. Back up the stairs from a third side, they entered the Mayan temple at the top, some seventy-nine feet at its highest point
.
When their father met them at the top, he told them how the four stairways added up to three-hundred and sixty-five steps, one for each day of the year, and how the nine levels were consistent in Mayan mythology with the nine figures of the Lords of the Night.
As the boys listened to their father’s knowledge of the past, they felt a cosmic chill come over them, the tiny hairs on their arms pricked up, as though the past seemed to haunt the place. Juan imagined how the conquistadors who conquered Central and South America had come ashore and seen this temple and still went forward in haste with destroying the way of life of the indigenous peoples. Juan was silent as he contemplated history’s cruel reality: one group of people overtaking another. The world was a litany of conflict and displacement, erasure and supplanting, the use of force and the subsequent reaction of resistance, the imposition of flux and change, nothing staying the same. Alberto shook his head in wonderment that the past seemed so heartless.
By the afternoon, they headed just south to another Mayan settlement, Pyramid of the Magician, in Uxmal. The site consisted of five temples in what was called the Nunnery Quadrangle. The pyramid itself had unequal sections. Juan and Alberto climbed one of the two steep stairways that led up to two temples, each at a different level. When they carefully made it back down the steep gradient of steps, their father told them to look up again at the portal entrance to the first temple.
“It’s supposed to look like the face and mouth of a monster,” he explained.
The boys stared up with their hands cupped over their eyes to deflect the piercing sun.
“Why a monster?” asked Juan.
“To scare away anything in the afterlife, I guess,” commented their father.
That night Alberto thought about the afterworld and whether there would be anything to fear, any monsters to face and defeat. As he tossed and turned in bed, Juan asked him what was the matter.
“Do you think we have anything to be afraid of when we die?” his younger brother asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t think about dying. Brother Marco kept telling us as long as we follow the sacraments, we’ll be fine.”
“What do you think?”
“I think we should try to do good,” said Juan, curious about his brother’s depth of musing. “You all right?”
“Yeah, I’m just thinking really hard.”
“You sound like me?
“We’re brothers.”
After falling asleep, they both dreamed about the Mayans. They imagined themselves living in peace and harmony among the ancient civilization. Juan saw himself as an engineer overseeing the construction of his own great monument. But he was also a laborer hauling the white tonnage stones and slapping down heaps of mortar with his bare hands. When he woke, his imaginary temple had almost been completed, so he wondered what it meant that his monument was left unfinished. In Alberto’s dream, he stood atop a pyramid, the entire Mayan civilization standing below him in a courtyard. As he prepared to ascend to heaven, through the vast black expanse of the starry sky, Emilia appeared in a white gown at his side. She reached for his hand and wanted to make the journey with him. He was not alone. He woke early the next day with his heart longing to see her.
Their sightseeing on the second day took them farther south to Palenque, where they visited The Pyramid of the Inscriptions. The drive to the site was gorgeous. Surrounded by the blinding beauty of the lush green vegetation of southern Mexico, the ruins were comprised of a series of structures built with white stone. Hieroglyphs and carvings covered the walls of the buildings and temples.
“The glory of the Mayan empire can be understood in these writings,” said Florencio.
“What were they trying to say?” asked Alberto.
“Well, one theory is that they wanted their dynasty to last forever,” said his father. “That’s why they wrote down los nombres of their rulers.”
“It’s like trying to live forever, isn’t it?” asked Juan.
“That’s one way of putting it,” said his father.
The rectangular temple at the top of the pyramid was inscribed with more hieroglyphs. From within the temple, a stairway led down to a crypt. The walls were embellished with the same elaborate reliefs of the nine Night Lords that their father had told them about when they visited El Castillo. But there in Palenque, where the ruins sprung up among the indomitable green of the vegetation, the idea of eternity seemed more real to the brothers. At the bottom of the crypt rested the sarcophagus of Pacal II, a formidable ruler of the Bak kingdom of the seventh century. Now his tomb marked a place where people from around the world came to visit. Sightseers breathed life into the dead, Juan thought, as if for anything to become eternal, the only necessity was for someone to remember, to acknowledge that it had once existed. Memory was tangible.
On the third day, they traveled south over the border to Guatemala, to the city of Tikal, to see the great Mayan structure, Temple I, located in the heart of the El Petén Rain Forest. If the green made them feel alive and renewed at Palenque, when they arrived at Temple I in Tikal, they felt as though the jungle was a moat protecting the miracle of the one-hundred and fifty foot pyramid that rose above the tree tops and resembled a tall sage, a beacon in the middle of a sea of green, similar to the lighthouse of El Faro in Havana Bay.
Again, the same as El Castillo at Chichén Itzá, Temple I at Tikal had nine layers on the way to the top, where the temple of the Great Jaguar sat and where the tomb of Ha Saha Kauil, the Mayan king of the seventh and eighth century, rested in the temple. Images of the supernatural adorned the walls, and the feeling of having a connection with the world beyond nature filled the brothers’ souls in this place. They loved how the compactness of the humid air gave them a feeling of unity and marvel. They were a part of nature and part of the past. They could feel their hearts racing and then calming, knowing that everything beautiful had its place, every movement and sound had a harmony. And for Alberto, the beauty of the temple forced him to think of Emilia’s pretty face. He wanted only to think of beautiful things, and the pyramid and temple at Tikal possessed unparalleled beauty, just like Emilia. There was magic in this place, just like the magic of music. He couldn’t wait to tell Emilia about it.
The final leg of their vacation took them several hundred miles north to Mexico City. They stayed in a hotel in the downtown district and traveled northwest of the city limits to Teotihuacán the next morning to see the last architectural wonder on their trip, The Pyramid of the Sun. It was the largest of the magnificent structures they saw over the previous three days. Its height reached up over two-hundred feet. The base of the pyramid was also larger than any of the others they’d seen, so the sides were not nearly as precipitous, rather they had more platform steps to climb. The trek to the top proved more tiresome because of the enormity of the red and brown stone monument. The main facade faced the west, and the boys made it to the top just as the sun began to set. Beneath the pyramid laid a cave dug out in the shape of a cloverleaf. For the ancient worshippers at this site, as the sun set on the pyramid, they meditated on the leaf’s shape that rested below, the shape of life, a symbol of both birth and renewal. Even as night fell, darkness did not mean the dimming of the day. The image of the leaf and its color of growth never rested. It was alive like the sun, which needed its rest, the leaf underneath to remind them that life revolved around the eternal.
As the sun came down over the former land of the ancient Mesoamerican civilization, Alberto again thought about Emilia and how they were so young and where they would be when they got older and then very old like his Abuelo Gabriel before he died. Would they be together, he and Emilia? Or would they even know each other? He closed his eyes knowing that he and his brother and father had visited some of the most spectacular places of ancient history, ruins that had not been destroyed by time, things that stood long before them and would stand long after they were gone from the Earth. And he thought, what was love? How could it be measured? What did it ma
tter in comparison to things that could not be destroyed? If his memories were forever within him, they would only die when he died. He turned his face towards the setting sun and slowly closed his eyelids. His father and brother had walked around the platform to take in the view from the other side. He was left in his solitude to feel the warmth of a thousand generations before him. After a few moments of letting his mind roam adrift, he heard the clicking noises of someone taking pictures with a camera. Alberto opened his eyes and saw a man with a wide and generous smile and a pair of beady, squinty eyes. While the man took another picture of Alberto, he had the labored breathing of an asthmatic, as though he had burdened himself with climbing the steps to reach the top of the pyramid.
“Hola, young man, do you mind if I take some pictures of you?”
“No problema.”
“I just saw you with your eyes closed facing the setting sol. You looked so peaceful. I couldn’t resist capturing such a picture.”
“Yeah, sure.”
As the man snapped away, he asked, “Cómo te llamas?”
“Alberto Ramos.”
With his camera in his right hand, the man used his left to pull something out of a faded green canvas bag slung across his torso with a strap.
“Well, Señor Ramos. If you write down your address for me, I’ll mail you one of these pictures when I develop them.”
The man handed him a small wire-bound notebook and a pencil. Alberto took the items and wrote out his address.
When the man looked at the address, he said, “You live in Havana? I’m headed there soon with some . . .” He held back with how to phrase what he didn’t want to disclose. “I’m going to Havana with some loyal friends in the near future,” he finally admitted. “By the way, I’m Ernesto Guevara. But my friends call me Che.”
The Ramos Brothers Trust Castro and Kennedy Page 11