It works, doesn’t it? Remember that I’m not going to repeat anything. There will be plenty of people to spin their tales. Now we’ll have the testimonials, of course, everybody has a story to tell, everybody makes a big fuss, everybody screams, and everybody was—isn’t that nice?—against the tyranny. And I don’t doubt it. Oh, but then! Who didn’t have a political badge, awarded, of course, by the regime? Make sure you find out, didn’t your father belong to the militia, didn’t he do voluntary work? Voluntary, that was the word. Even I, when Castro was thrown out of power, almost got executed as a castrista. How awful! What saved me were the letters I had written to my sister, who was living in exile. What if I didn’t have them anymore? She had to send them back to me fast, or else I would be dead and gone. And that’s why I haven’t dared go out of the house, because some, a lot, of that still exists. And I don’t want to get any closer to it. I . . . so you are asking me to speak, to contribute, to cooperate—I’m sorry, that’s not the way you say it now—with whatever I know, because you intend to write a book or something, with one of the victims. A double victim, you will have to say. Or triple. Or better, a victimized victim. Or better still, a victim victimized by the victims. Well, you’ll have to fix that. Write whatever you want. You don’t need to give it to me for approval. I don’t want to see anything. I’m taking advantage, however, of this freedom of “expression” to tell you that you are a vulture. Turkey vultures, we called them. Have they all been eliminated? No longer needed? What wonderful birds! They used to feed on carrion, on corpses, and then they soared into the skies. And what was the reason for their extermination? Didn’t they clean up the island under every regime? And how they gorged themselves. . . . Perhaps they got poisoned by eating the bodies of those executed by justice—is that still how you say it?—that is, by you. . . . Listen, will you bring that machine closer to me? Quickly, because I’m in a rush, and I’m old and tired. And to tell you the truth, I’ve been poisoned too. This machine—is it working?—was very popular, though people usually never knew when it was being used. . . . Today you tell me what you’re going to do and why you have come to see me. We talk. And nobody is watching at the corner, right? And nobody will come and search my house after you’re gone, right? Anyway, I have nothing else to hide. And is it true I can say whether I’m for something or against it? Right now I can, if I want to, speak against the government, and nothing would happen? Maybe. Is it so, really? Yes, everything is like that now. Right there on the corner, they were selling beer today. There was a lot of noise. Music, they call it. People don’t look so scraggly or so angry anymore. There are no more slogans on the trees. People are going out, I see it, and you can get genuinely sad, with your own brand of sadness, I mean. People have food, aspirations, dreams (Do they have dreams?), and they dress in bright colors. But I still don’t believe this, as I already told you. I’ve been poisoned. I have seen . . . but, oh, well, we should go straight to the point, which is what you want. We cannot waste any more time. Now we have to work, right? Before, the main thing was to pretend you were working. Now we have aspirations. . . . It’s a simple story. Yes, of course. But anyway, you won’t understand these things. Practically nobody can anymore. These things can’t be understood unless you have experienced them, like almost everything. . . . He wrote some books that should be around somewhere. Or maybe not. Maybe they were burned during the early dismantling of the regime. Then, at the very beginning, of course, those things happened. Inherited bad habits. I really know it’s been difficult to overcome all these “tendencies”—can you still call them that? All those books, as you know, spoke well of the deposed regime. However, it’s all a lie. You had to go to the fields, and he went. Nobody really knew that when he was working like a maniac, he was not doing it out of loyalty to the regime, but out of pure hate. You really had to see the fury with which he broke the lumps of earth, how he sowed the seeds, weeded, dug. Those earned the big bonus points then. Oh, God! There was such hate in him while he was doing everything and contributing to everything. How much he hated the whole thing. . . . They made him—he made himself—“a model youth,” “a frontline worker,” and they awarded him “the pennant.” If an extra shift of guard duty was needed, he would volunteer. If one more hand was needed at the sugarcane harvest, there he went. During his military service, was there anything he could say no to, when everything was official, patriotic, revolutionary, that is, inexcusable? And even out of the service, everything was compulsory. But by then it was worse, because he was not a youth anymore. He was a man, and he had to survive; that is, he needed a room, and also, for instance, a pressure cooker; and, for instance, a pair of pants. Would you believe me if I told you that the authorization for buying a shirt, and being able to pick it up, involved political privilege? I see you don’t believe me. So be it. But I hope you always can do that. . . . Since he hated the system so much, he spoke little; and since he didn’t speak much, he didn’t contradict himself, while others did, and what they said one day, they had to retract or deny the next—a problem of dialectics, people called it. And then, since he didn’t contradict himself, he became a well-trusted man, a respected man. He would never interrupt the weekly meetings. You had to see his attitude of approval while in reality he was dreaming of sailing, traveling, or being somewhere else, in “the land of the enemy” (as it was called), from which he would fly back carrying a bomb; and right there at the meeting—just like so many that he, ominously, had attended and applauded—in a plaza full of slaves, he would drop the bomb. . . . And so, for his “exemplary discipline and dutifulness in the Circles of Study” (that was the name given to the compulsory sessions on political indoctrination), he received another diploma. He would be the first one, when the time came, to read from Granma—I still remember the name of the official newspaper—not because he was really interested, but because his hatred for that publication was such that in order to get it over with quickly (as you would with anything you abhor), he would read it right away. When he raised his hand to donate this or that—we donated everything in public—how he secretly laughed at himself; how, inwardly, he exploded. . . . He would always do volunteer work for four or five extra hours—and pity thee if you didn’t! He did his compulsory guard duty with a rifle on his shoulder, and the building he was protecting had been built by the former regime—he was protecting his own hell. How many times had he thought of blowing his head off while shouting “Down with Castro,” or something like that . . . ?
But life is something else. People change. Do you know what fear is? Do you know what hatred is? Do you know what hope is? Do you know what total helplessness is? . . . Take care of yourself, and do not take anything for granted, don’t trust anything. Not even now. Even less now. Now that everything seems trustworthy, this is precisely the time to mistrust. Later it will be too late. Then you will have to obey orders. You are young, you don’t know anything. But your father, no doubt, was in the militia. Your father, no doubt . . . Don’t take part in anything. Leave!—can one leave the country now? It’s incredible. To leave . . . “If I could leave,” he would tell me, he would whisper in my ear after coming home from one of those everlasting events, after three hours of cheering. “If I could leave, if I could escape by swimming away, since any other way is impossible, or soar above this hell and get away from it all . . .” And I: Calm down, calm down, you know very well that is impossible; fragments of fingernails is what the fishermen are bringing back. Out there, they have orders to shoot point-blank, even if you surrender. Look at those searchlights. . . . And he himself at times had to take care of those same searchlights, and clean and shine the guns, that is, to watch over the tools of his own subjugation. And how disciplined he was, how much passion he put into it. You might say he was trying to create a cover-up through his actions, so that they would not reveal his authentic being. And he would come home exhausted, dirty, full of slaps on his back, and badges of honor. “Oh, if I had a bomb,” he would then tell me, or rather whisper into
my ear, “I would have blown myself up with it all. A bomb so powerful that there would be nothing left. Nothing. Not even me.” And I: Calm down, for goodness’ sake, wait, don’t say anything else, they can hear you, don’t spoil everything with your rage. . . . Disciplined, polite, hardworking, discreet, unpretentious, normal, easygoing, extremely easygoing, well adapted to the system precisely for being its complete opposite—how could they not make him a member of the Party?
Was there any job he didn’t do? And he was fast. What criticism didn’t he accept with humility? . . . And that immense hatred inside, that feeling of being humiliated, annihilated, buried, unable to say anything and having to submit in silence. And how silently!, how enthusiastically!, in order not to be even more humiliated, more annihilated, totally wiped out. So that someday, perhaps, he could be himself, take revenge: speak out, take action, live. . . . Ah, how often he wept at night, very quietly in his room, in there, the next one on this side. He wept out of rage and hatred. I shall never be able to recount—it would take more than a lifetime—all the vituperations he used to rattle out against the system. “I can’t go on, I can’t go on,” he would tell me. And it was true. Embracing me, embracing me—remember that I was also young, we were both young, just like you; though I don’t know, maybe you’re not so young: now everybody is so well fed. . . . Embracing me, he would say: “I can’t take it any longer; I can’t take it any longer. I’m going to cry out all my hatred. I’m going to cry out the truth,” he whispered, choking. And me? What did I do? I used to calm him down. I would tell him: Are you insane?— and I would rearrange his badges. If you do it, they are going to shoot you. Keep on pretending, like everybody else. Pretend even more than the others, make fun of him that way. Calm down, don’t talk nonsense. He never stopped performing his tasks dutifully, only being himself for a while at night, when he came to me to unburden his soul. Never, not even now when there is official approval, and even encouragement, did I ever hear anybody reject the regime so strongly. Since he was in the inner circle, he knew the whole operation, its most minute atrocities. Come morning he would return, enraged but silenced, to his post, to the meeting, to the fields, to the raising of hands to volunteer. He accumulated a lot of “merits.” It was then that the Party “oriented” him—and you don’t know what that word meant then—to write a series of biographies of high officials. “Do it,” I would say to him, “or you will lose all you have accomplished until now. It would be the end.” And so he became famous— they made him famous. He moved away and was assigned a large house. He married the woman they oriented him to. . . . I had a sister in exile. She used to come, though, and visit me. Very cautiously, she would bring his biographies under her arm. And she told me the truth: those people were all monsters. . . . Were they? Or were we? What do you think? Have you found out anything about your father? Have you learned anything else? Why did you choose precisely this tainted character for your job? Who are you? Why are you looking at me that way? Who was your father? Your father . . .” At the first opportunity, I’ll leave,” he used to tell me. “I know there is strict surveillance, that it’s practically impossible to defect, that there are many spies, many criminals on the loose; and that even if I manage to, someone shall murder me in exile. But before that I shall speak out. Before that, I will say what I feel, I will speak the truth. . . .” Calm down, don’t talk, I would tell him—and we were not that young anymore—don’t do anything crazy. And he: “Do you think that I can spend my whole life pretending? Don’t you realize that going so much against myself I won’t be me anymore? Don’t you see that I’m already but a shadow, a marionette, an actor who is never off the stage, where he only plays a shady character?” And I: Wait, wait. And I, understanding, weeping with him, and harboring as much, or even more, hatred in me—after all, I am, or was, a woman—pretending just like everybody else, conspiring secretly in my thoughts, in my soul, and begging him to wait, to wait. And he managed to wait. Until the moment came.
It happened when the regime was overthrown. He was tried and sentenced as an agent of the Castro dictatorship (all the proofs were against him) and condemned to the maximum punishment, death by shooting. Then, standing in front of the liberating firing squad, he shouted: “Down with Castro! Down with tyranny! Long live Freedom!” Until the full discharge silenced him, he kept on shouting. Shouts that the press and the world defined as “cowardly cynicism.” But I— and please write this down, just in case your machine is not working—I can assure you that this was the only authentic thing your father had ever said out loud in his whole life.
Havana, 1974
End of a Story
For Juan Abreu and Carlos Victoria,
triumphant, that is, survivors
THE SOUTHERNMOST POINT IN THE U.S. That’s what the sign says. And how could we say that in Spanish? El punto más al sur de los Estados Unidos. But it’s not the same. It’s too long and lacks precision, strength. In Spanish it’s not so clear: there is no word as exact as “southernmost.” However, in English, that “southernmost point” is absolutely clear, with those †s sticking up at the end: the world ends right here; once you leave this “point” and go over the horizon, all you’ll find is the Sargasso Sea, the ominous ocean. Those †s are no letters but crosses, markers—look at the way they stick up—clearly indicating that behind them lies death, or even worse, hell. And that’s how it truly is. But anyway, we’re already here. I finally managed to get you here. I would much have preferred that you had come on your own, and had sent your smiling photo by that sign to me, to the other edge of the Sargasso Sea (so everybody over there would have died of envy, or of rage), and that you could have spit, as I’m doing now, on these waters where hell begins. Anyway, I would have liked you to stay here, on this unique key, a hundred and fifty-seven miles from Miami and only ninety miles away from Cuba, right in the middle of the ocean, sharing the same sea breeze, the same ocean hues, almost the same landscape, but none of the horrors. I would have liked to bring you here—but not having to practically drag you here like this—and not precisely so that you would lose yourself in these waters, but so that you would understand how lucky you were to be this far from them. Despite my insistence—or perhaps because of it—you were unwilling to come here. You thought that what attracted me to this place was merely homesickness, the nearness to our island, and the loneliness, the discouragement, the sense of failure. You never understood anything—or maybe, in your own way, you understood too much. Loneliness, homesickness, memories—call it what you will—I feel all of that. It makes me suffer but, at the same time, I get some pleasure from it. Yes, I enjoy it. Above all, what makes me come here is the sensation, the certainty, of experiencing a feeling of triumph. . . . To be able to look southward, to look at that sky, which I hate and love so much, and to throw punches at it; to raise my arms and laugh out loud, while I can almost hear from over there, from the other side of the sea, the anguished, muted cries of all those who would like to be here like me, cursing, shouting, hating, and being really lonely; not like over there, where even being alone is persecuted and is enough to land you in jail for being “antisocial.” Here you can lose your way or find it and nobody gives a damn where you’re going. And that, for those of us who understand how that other system works, is also a blessing. You thought I wouldn’t be able to see the advantages here and make use of them; that I couldn’t adapt. Yes, I know what you said. That I wouldn’t ever learn a word of English, that I wouldn’t write even a single line more, that once here I would have no more themes or plots, that even my most constant demons would be dying out when faced with the unavoidable spectacle of the supermarkets and of 42nd Street, or with the desperate need to find a place for myself in one of those towers around which the world turns, or with the certainty of knowing that there are no more secret files on us, and that we are no longer a cause of concern for the state. I know everyone thought I was finished, done for. And that you yourself had gone along with the system’s maneuvers. I’ll n
ever forget how you laughed with a tinge of mockery and sad satisfaction every time the phone rang, and how you relished every opportunity to criticize my lack of discipline, my indolence. When I told you that I was settling down, adjusting, or simply surviving, and thus gathering stories, plots, you looked at me with pity in your eyes, sure that I had perished among the new hypocrisies, the inevitable relationships, the perversions of success or the intolerable gush of words, words. . . . But listen to me: it didn’t turn out at all like that; look, twenty years of pretending, of forced cowardice and humiliation don’t dissolve just like that. . . . I’m not going to forget how critical you were, always observing me, ready for disapproval, surely expecting me to break down and join the anonymous masses going through the noisy, frozen tunnels or the hostile streets, buffeted by the winds of hell. But that didn’t happen, you hear? Those twenty years of shrewd hypocrisy, of repressed terror, kept me from going under. That is also why I have dragged you here, to make sure you are clearly defeated and at peace—maybe even happy—and to prove to you, I can’t hide my pride, that you are the one who buckled under.
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