Uncle Arturo was fortune-telling: “I predict that President Clinton and the pope will come together to Cuba for a visit. Mark my words. Remember this date.”
I remember. October 1, 1993.
The phone. The cradle. Father running his hand through his hair. He came back to the dinner table. His coconut pie was cold. He looked at Mom. He grinned at me and, reassured, I went back to my dessert.
“What was the call?” Uncle Arturo asked.
“Aldo got sick, my stand-in. They want me for the morning.”
Arturo was appalled. “You can’t go back. You only just got here. The kids haven’t had any time to play with their cousins. We haven’t even been to the beach.”
Dad shook his head. “No, no, everyone will stay. I’ll get the ten o’clock train back tonight.”
“Can’t they get anyone else? Why is it always you?” Mom asked.
“I’m the only one they trust,” he said, then walked over and kissed her on the forehead. Mom frowned, wondering, I suppose, if it was really Aldo or some hussy from the Vieja that Dad had been planning to see the whole time.
Sundown.
Games of canasta and poker and my favorite, twenty-one.
Uncle Arturo told a stupid joke: “What do you call a French sandal maker? Answer: Philippe Flop.”
Dad told a subversive joke: “What are the three successes of the Revolution? Answer: Health care, education, and sport. What are the three failures of the Revolution? Answer: Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
Supper of nutella on toast.
The bed. Ricky on one side, me on the other.
The fields alive with insects and huge colonies of Jamaican fruit bats blotting out the moon.
Dad in for the goodnight story and the kiss.
Rum breath. Tears in his eyes. No story. Nothing. Not even goodbye.
Next day.
The beach. The tide out and the sand wet, freezing. Kelp on the dunes, see-through jellyfish. My hands blue. A cut on my right thumb hurting in the wind.
There was nothing to do. The others had gone on ahead and I was too late to catch them. I walked along making trails with my feet and wrote my name in the sand with a piece of driftwood. I picked up a length of seaweed and popped some of the float pods on the strands. They went snap and briny water came out of them, trundling down my fingers onto Aunt Isabella’s white shawl.
Farther along the shore I noticed a dead gull. Its wings were covered in what looked like a thick gray film but was really dozens of little crabs.
Drizzle, clouds.
Flocks of birds heading for South America. Other lands. Other countries. No one I knew had ever been to another country, but Ricky and Dad had once seen Haiti from the headland at Punta de Quemado.
More beach.
A dead shark with its black eyes pecked out. Its belly had swollen. I found a stick and cut it open to see if there were other fish inside. I poked, guts spilled. The perfume of death. Intestines. Stones. No fish.
I walked on. It started to rain. Now I was wet and alone. I cursed my stubbornness. Uncle Arturo had gotten everyone up at nine, for baseball and a day at the beach, but I woke in a huff about Dad, furious that he had gone back to his stupid job, ferrying stupid people across the stupid bay in his stupid boat. I refused to go. Mom begged me and was embarrassed but Aunt Isabella pretended I was sick and brought me moors and christians and soup and a shawl and a book of poems by José Martí.
After they all had left, guilt finally got me out of bed. I rummaged for clothes, found a green dress and the shawl—no shoes, no underwear—and went after them, but I couldn’t find them. And now I was a little lost.
Rain. Sand. Black clouds. A dog came bounding over. Black labrador, sandy paws, floppy ears. “Good boy,” I said, grabbing him by the collar. His tag said he was called Suerte—Lucky.
I patted him. “Are you lost too? Are you? Where did you come from? Do you want to be my friend?”
I didn’t see many dogs in Havana—you had to get a special permit to own a dog and often they caused resentment. Dogs ate meat, and for many people that was rubbing it in.
“Lucky, I like that. Lucky you met me.”
A boy walked over the dune. Black, a little older than me, wearing shorts, a yellow T-shirt, no shoes either.
“Your dress is soaked, I can see through to your papaya,” the boy said.
“You shouldn’t be looking,” I replied, my cheeks burning.
“I, I was only joking.”
“I don’t find that joke very funny.”
“That’s my dog,” he said.
“You can have him,” I said, pushing the dog away from me.
“Hey!” someone called up from the dirt road beyond the dune.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” the boy said. “But I know you.”
“Oh yeah? Who am I?”
“You’re staying with your cousins in the Hacienda Mercado.”
“That’s right.”
“Your uncle is a very bad man,” the boy said, taking his dog and keeping it close to him.
“Why?”
“He beat me for talking to Juanita.”
Uncle Arturo was an important official in the regional government. He had every expectation of his daughters marrying well and moving to Havana. It didn’t surprise me that he’d beaten this poor black kid from the village for talking with the lovely Juanita.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Patrice.”
“What kind of a name is that?”
“Haitian, I mean French.”
Ricky ran down from the road. He was breathless. “We should go, there’s some kind of trouble. Uncle Arturo got a tipoff that the police are coming. He sent me to look for you.”
Patrice, Lucky, Ricky, and I ran back together.
It was almost dusk when we made it to the village. The rain had eased and there was a helicopter. My mouth went dry. In Cuba only the army flew helicopters. What kind of trouble meant the army? We walked closer until we saw police vans and cops blocking the roads in and out of the village.
“Get down,” I said and pulled Ricky to the ground. Lucky ran back to his house and Patrice followed him. “Hey!” I called after him, but some instinct told Patrice to get away from us.
To one side of the settlement were three big fields that had been zoned for a new coffee plantation, which for one reason or another had never materialized. The fields had been left to grow wild and palms and mangrove trees and tall grasses had sprung up. Excellent cover. We ducked off the road and into the undergrowth, crawling toward the hacienda. Scores of police and troops and plainclothes DGI and DGSE men. The helicopter, a huge Russian thing, was shining a spotlight down onto the village.
We got on our bellies now and slithered all the way around to Uncle Arturo’s yard.
A confusion of soldiers, cops, civilians. The street had been blocked off by army jeeps manned by troops toting enormous machine guns. The police had their guns drawn and there were still more soldiers in green fatigues with black armbands kneeling and pointing rifles at the hacienda. The villagers were congregating behind the jeeps—almost everyone in the little hamlet had come out to enjoy the spectacle. The helicopter came lower and its spotlight began scanning the house, the yard, and the fields beyond.
“We’re going to be seen here,” I whispered to Ricky.
“What do we do?”
“The palm tree,” I said. “In the break between the beams. Stay with me.”
We scrambled into the yard and climbed the palm tree at the back of the house. From up here we could see everything better. All told there were about fifty soldiers and as many police fiercely surrounding Uncle Arturo’s house as if it contained lost survivors from the Bay of Pigs.
A lead policeman in a civilian suit was trying to speak into a megaphone but he couldn’t get the thing to work.
The big helicopter was landing. It was probably running low on gas.
&n
bsp; The noise was incredible. We watched it until it went behind the trees, thundering, shaking coconuts out of the branches. Other cops had set up a generator and when they turned it on arc lights flooded the scene.
I hadn’t stopped shivering since the beach and six meters up a palm tree was no place for a fainting fit.
“What do you think Uncle Arturo did?” Ricky asked.
“Maybe this is about the American cigarettes and those magazines.”
The policeman with the megaphone finally got it to work. He stood on a tree stump and started telling the other police officers to get the civilians away.
“Why is he doing that?” I wondered.
“In case there’s a shootout, of course.”
“How do you know he has a gun?” I asked.
“I’ve seen it. Juanita said—Hey look, it’s the sausages,” Ricky said, pointing to the line of ’izos three branches up. “That was a pretty good throw for a girl; pity girls can’t play baseball.”
“They can and they do.”
“In America,” Ricky said dismissively.
In the typically Cuban way, a man pushing a food cart appeared from nowhere. He was selling flan and beer but the police made him go away after confiscating all his merchandise for themselves.
Finally, when the policeman with the megaphone was satisfied that the crowd was sufficiently safe, he turned his attention back to the hacienda. He was a short guy with shiny black hair and boots.
“Arturo Mercado, come out with your hands up,” the cop said.
The crowd went silent and then much to our surprise Uncle Arturo answered: “What is this? I’ve done nothing wrong!”
“Send out your family,” the policeman said.
“I have a right to know what this is about. Under the Cuban Penal Code all persons have a right to know what they are being charged with,” Arturo shouted.
“You are not being charged with anything, Mercado, not yet. We want to question you. Be a man, at least send out your family.”
“How do I know they’ll be safe?” Uncle Arturo said.
“Of course they will be safe. There are hundreds of witnesses.”
“Give me your word.”
The cop blanched for a moment but then recovered his poise. “My name is Captain Armando Beltre. I give you my word that if you release your family to my care, they will be unharmed.”
Five minutes later the cousins, Mom, Luisa, and Aunt Isabella came out. Everyone was carrying suitcases and bags as if they might be going away for some time. I was impressed. Uncle Arturo had clearly had some time to prepare. They walked past Captain Beltre and were grabbed by the leading edge of the police. The children were separated from the women, who were all bundled together into a police julia.
“Did you see that they took Mom to the police van?” Ricky asked.
“I did. Don’t worry. Mom didn’t do anything.”
At around midnight there was a shot from inside the house and everyone screamed. One of the policemen shot back and then another and another. The order came to cease fire. The policeman with the megaphone shouted into the house to see if Uncle Arturo was all right, but there was no answer. Not long after the shooting another older policeman turned up. He looked to be pretty high up and he seemed displeased with everything that had been going on. Immediately after talking to Captain Beltre, he ordered the street cleared. The cops and the army started moving everyone back into their houses or way down the village into the fields. The older policeman took the megaphone and said that if Uncle Arturo didn’t come out he would order the army to storm the place and Arturo would be responsible for the consequences.
Uncle Arturo came out.
He was wearing a white shirt and there was blood on the shoulder. He was holding his hands in the air. He walked to the front of the house and lay down in the yard. Policemen ran and cuffed him.
“This is fantastic,” I said to Ricky.
“Yup,” he replied breathlessly.
Both of us were shaking with excitement.
Uncle Arturo was bleeding into his shirt and his eyes were red and his hair was everywhere. I’d never seen him without even a tie before. Two policemen in riot gear hauled him to his feet. Uncle Arturo didn’t resist. He looked exhausted. Like us. Like everybody. I was staring at the blood on his shirt and wondering if he’d been shot or not. I’d never seen anyone shot before either.
The soldiers pushed Uncle Arturo toward one of the army trucks, but suddenly he stopped and looked up into the tree where the pair of us were hiding.
Ricky grabbed my arm and I grabbed him right back.
Uncle Arturo grinned. “I see you,” he said. “I see what you did with those sausages.”
One of the policemen looked up into the branches but he didn’t notice anything. He shrugged his shoulders and shoved Uncle Arturo from behind. “Come on,” the policeman said, and he led Uncle Arturo under the canvas flap of one of the trucks. After a couple of minutes, they transferred him to a police car and turned the siren on. Shortly after that the car drove off toward Santiago. Ricky was shaking and holding on to me tightly. We were both frightened and exhilarated at the same time.
“What do we do now?” Ricky asked.
“Now we climb down the tree,” I said.
We climbed down. I tapped the nearest cop on the back. He turned.
“We surrender,” I said.
Later, years later, I found out that Uncle Arturo had spent the night destroying papers that implicated him in dozens of bribery and blackmail schemes. He needn’t have bothered. The police weren’t interested in him at all. In fact, within six months he was back in the hacienda with his government salary and position restored.
No, the police had come because my father and some others had hijacked one of the Havana Bay ferries to Florida. Previous attempts had failed because the ferry had run out of fuel, but my father and his cronies had trundled in dozens of drums of diesel. They’d taken the fast ferry, a gift from the Japanese government, because it could do twenty knots. They’d gone on the very first run of the day, straight out of the harbor and north for Key West. It took the sleeping authorities an hour to realize what was happening and the hijackers confused them by saying that they had left the harbor only because the steerage was jammed. Then they reported a fire, and by the time the government realized it was a hijack they were halfway to the Keys.
Uncle Arturo was suspected of complicity but he knew nothing about it.
None of us did.
The cops reunited us with our cousins, and María told me the details at our grandmother’s house. “Your father is a dirty traitor. He has joined the Yankees in Miami.”
They took Mom to Havana and kept her in a DGI dungeon for a week and then let her out.
She had bruises on her back and thighs.
She never talked about what they did to her. She just got on with things.
The power cuts, the end-of-the-month scramble for food, mending our school uniforms, the TV repairman who would take payment only in dollars . . .
Eventually she got a job as a maid in the Hotel Nacional—one of the best jobs in Havana because of the tips—and saved enough so that Ricky and I could go to college.
Uncle Arturo denounced Papa in the newspapers and, of course, after that we never went to Santiago again. And nothing came from America. No letters. No money. We heard that he had remarried. He moved from Miami to New York.
And then he disappeared.
Drifted from our lives.
Dissolved, like he was never there.
Vanished like a dandelion on the curve of air.
And that’s all that needs to be said.
He isn’t here.
He isn’t anywhere.
He’s not a character in this story.
He’s a template. A tabula rasa. For me to write my narrative, for me to invent myself.
And now, dying, I understand why I came.
It isn’t for him.
It isn’t for just
ice.
It’s in spite of him.
It’s for truth.
I am the girl on the beach looking inside a shark for other fish.
I am the sleepwalker awakened. Awakened on the edge of the precipice.
I needed the bullet. I needed the bullet to show me that I want an end to the lies.
You betrayed us, Papa. You didn’t tell us. And I came here to show you that truth is important. The truth wipes everything away. All the forgotten birthdays. All the tears. All the hurt. You enjoyed that other world. The infidelities. The Cuban game. But it wasn’t a game to Mom. Or us. Is that what you liked most of all? The deceit? The deceit more than the conquest.
And now I see deeper still. It’s truth, but also pride. To show you that despite your lack of concern for your family we turned out well, Ricky and me.
Look at the pair of us, doing everything we can to discover who killed you.
Look at us, sticking our toes in the waters of revenge.
Risking everything for you. Dying for you.
I’ll never find out why you left. You had a wife who loved you, two kids, a good job. You were never a political person. You didn’t care about politics. Why did you jump? Where did you get that gun? I don’t know. All of that information died with you on the mountaintop. But it doesn’t even matter.
Do you hear what I’m saying, Papa?
I didn’t come for you! I’m here for me! I’m here for us!
Cold.
Freezing.
Not the cold of Santiago.
Winter cold.
The cold of frozen water.
Ice.
My mind aswim. Shouting. Gurgling.
Blood in my mouth. Cold grabbing my shoulders like the secret police.
I sink into consciousness.
They’re talking.
Their song swells.
I find that I understand them.
I reshape the world. Gone is the palm tree. The ’izos. Here is the wind, the wet.
Voices.
“Fucking one shot. Blew her the fuck away.”
“We got ninety-nine problems but the bitch ain’t one.”
“Paul, you ok?”
“I don’t think he’s still alive.”
“Get him out.”
“He’s breathing.”
“Get him out and put her in the fucking hole.”
Fifty Grand Page 29