by Edie Meidav
Mostly life makes sense in the gym, a place your mother calls the cathedral. In the gym, you take what is usually kept from you. Outside, Sundays at four you go to queue up for the fresh bread that will emerge from the government bakery, palming ten pesitos, and when you first approach the people sitting zigzag, no one’s idea of a straight line, you say the words—the last? And the last person signals so you know now you are the last the way you will also signal to the next to arrive, the same way people try to leave the island, waiting for their Boca uncle or Tampa aunt to send for their escape, hoping to one day tell others they are behind them. Waiting, you pace, flipping coins in line for two hours, talking in the heat with kids whose mothers have sent them or watching grownups who lose their friendliness whenever they enter this waiting in which life stops. And no matter how long everyone has postponed anything else, once the bakery opens its door, always there arrive the adults who show up on magic gliding feet, free to cut to the head without waiting for anything, just picking up their bread. Perhaps it is in the bread line that the idea of abroad and escape bites hardest, because when the gliders skim off, some small murder clots in the face of those who stand and wait, one you understand since you’ve also seen it settling into your mother when your father hates the scent of her cooking, he can’t help it, gas flame and onions do him wrong, all her damn ritual irritates, but when home and joyless, he bolts down her moros y cristianos. One day your older brothers and sisters are nowhere, leaving you and your mother plunged into the rites you like, she accepting your slump on the sofa. Your father gobbles behind you at the table before shoving his chair back, ready to head out after eating because he hates the stench of her cooking oil but instead of complaining and disappearing, he falls to his knees and then his face. You think he is joking, Papi, you call, and then your mother slaps him, calmer than you would think, all of this in two minutes? Three? He opens his eyes and comes back with a roar, cranky, telling you tranquila already, he has come back, he’s fine, what’s the fuss? Your mother flutters, suggesting possibilities, but your father says please no doctor, he trusts no one outside the family. He has seen the excellent doctors the revolution produced: no one has supplies and they improvise with cheap Chinese equipment they can’t operate. Anyway, his was just a knockout! In the run-up to the bad joke of this moment, these last few months he has rued your new habits, forever reminding you he used to box for you to know he did something more than be a ruined shell in the government system: he wants you to know he still has a vein back to the man he once was, entering a ring of equals, bare-chested, ready to swing. Later your mother will regret having listened to him. I should’ve called for an ambulance, she will say, leaning into your shoulder a little too hard.
The moment after returning to life, your father draws the drapes before collapsing into the sofa to watch a government man intone about the exciting new drilling the government will do off the Havana shore, television light playing off his face, making him a statue, his strangeness compelling you to jump rope in the apartment, part of your training, legs crisscrossed and tricky, what your mother usually forbids indoors but the rhythmic slap soothes, your stomach up in your throat from the effort, meaning you almost don’t notice your father screwing his head around to look at you until you pause and hear him apologize for the first time ever, saying: Sorry, mijo, sorry, I am not going to make it. Then he passes out for good.
He didn’t make it, the sorry echoing in you, only discipline cleaning up that sorriness. Advantages flock. Your coach Jimenez fills you with new stories. He tells you to stop eating bread so that only two weeks after the funeral where your father lay waxy, you are free, no longer waiting in the Sunday queue because your mother and Jimenez talk for the first time after she finally makes her way to the gym, wearing the mourning kerchief which made her look tinier while Jimenez recites condolences and then with slow patience the new litany: fish-head soup, beef nearly raw, root vegetables and greens, avoid staples, rice, sweets, bread and butter. We’ll try, your mother says, our boy’s skinny. But fast, Jimenez tells her, and a southpaw, which surprises everyone. Plus he’s long but strong, like iron, we should call him Hierro. She takes this in enough that she will never again send for bread, you for the first time out of the queue, now a man in the house. Only occasionally do you hear the ghostly heavy tread of your father’s feet on the broken linoleum. Two weeks in, your future already tastes better. If your mother had never seemed happy around your father, after he is gone she sinks deep into herself and you start to feel Jimenez, who calls you Hierro, is the mother you might have had if seven kids and a dead husband had not tired your real one out. Your father, anyway, hardly counts as your mother’s first death. You may be the seventh child but the sixth died before you were born and into that sadness you’d grown, the last but no one’s runt, taller than even your oldest brother, taller than your father was, and maybe this tallness you half overhear whenever your tired mother and pretty lipsticked aunt discuss matters in the kitchen as they do now more frequently, half whiffs of bits, nothing you can locate. Far more understandable to spend hours in the gym, far more understandable the first time you fight a real opponent and hear a roar not because of a crowd but because you are going up against someone the coach from the capital has brought in, a rising star, a boy named Franco who has agreed to fight. The two older trainers watch you say hello to Franco as if watching their youth or a meteor shower: nothing for them to do at this point. Franco shows his toughness in not staring you down the way others from your town do, the cheapest tactic of fighting dogs, instead focusing only on his coach who stays busy trading stories with Jimenez about their shared time in the training camp. All this camaraderie sickens because you’re partly meant to kill this boy, steadfast in watching his coach finally wrap his hand with gauze, your opponent treating it like a sacrament unlike the guys who glance around the second someone starts wrapping their hands as if anyone caring for them turns them into top-level bureaucrats and movie stars. Instead this kid glowers, making the smallest zone of his knuckles matter, the winding of the gauze as important as the fight to come, its first round about to make you forget everything your coach ever said, though once it starts somewhere in the back you hear Jimenez bellowing from the ropes something about the candle, which makes no sense when this boy hoves in, left hooks and cross-jabs out of nowhere, eyes tricky and hot, a boy from a world different from others. You cannot predict his moves but you bear down to find the opening, you almost see the candle, almost lure him into what Jimenez calls the house. Become the candle with the flickering head, that’s all you try to do, the sting in your fists hungry to get him to his knees again, not wanting him to get up for a new round in which his fist goes for your jaw, your southpaw snapping. Trying to remember your own invented secret: to gain control, you breathe out when you pull back, no one having trained you, most people only complaining when someone toward the end of a match starts mouth-breathing and losing his guard, and though Jimenez schooled you in eight stages of mastery, the breath stays your own, a freedom making you bear down and absorb the roar. The fight could have gone otherwise but you end up leveling your first real challenger. Dignity is the first choice, you remember being drilled in school, and even if the great leader said it first, it stays your own.
Because here is the alternative: digging. Digging anywhere, in garbage cans next to piles of blond sleeping dogs to see if you can scrabble up metal to bring to the repair shop so they can patch cars and bikes. Or digging for favors like your neighbor on one of the government plantations where blistering sprays leave a person sick but still able to see a doctor at the hospital for free. Or for shelter like your father did in a government job where people argue all day, sharks snipping bits, complaining about tiny rations while trying to bribe everyone on the side. Or burrowing in to forget, becoming a man betting on dominos on the street while drinking cheap aguardiente. Forget digging, take a bus to the city to see what makes it run. Your brother Felipe followed that route and became on
e of the smartest drug dealers near the hotel with the best Internet, the one that brought foreign men looking for a place that doesn’t mind them living it up with girls who then escape the island and send home packets of money. Felipe told you about it once he didn’t have to leave the island to send home those packets. Then in an island-wide raid at dawn he got nabbed and spent eight years in prison boxing mousetraps. At this point your mother is tired out enough to trust Jimenez, the first outside man to take interest in her brood. You know only that the revolution broke his family into shards. Once they were one of the biggest plantation holders near your village which meant a few of his brothers got imprisoned for treason and bad capitalist thinking, one shot, one spoke a false confession for the radio, one fled for Miami, the last came back never the same. In this way, Jimenez learned revolutionary lessons, like you being a younger sibling knowing how to hide power and so good at counseling you in the same strategies. While you trust him because he found the god you never knew lived in your fists.
He must not be wholly wrong. Others find it too. Consider that first lunch, you already fourteen. A lady, the wife of an official who oversees one of the later tournaments, in the capital where maybe the great leader will also one day watch you fight. She asks what you would like to eat, her voice coming out from bowed lips under a perfumed cloud of hair, her shiver visible inside a shirt so thin shoulder bones nearly puncture the cloth. You realize she must not be that much older than you and shift in your seat as she orders plates to start coming: beans and rice, bread and custard, no fish-head soup but everything you want to swallow three times more quickly than she nibbles, your appetite massive, capable of gobbling the golden promise of her voice. In a week you will go live with boys at the camp to train for the elite team and this lady is the welcome sent your way by the government. Other than the mayor of your dusty town, she is the first government person you’ve met, you shuddering while her speech sings forth, so gentle you strain to hear it. Knowing that if you can just understand that voice, you will find your future made up of lunches, all will open.
What would you—and her cheeks flame, making your own cheeks blaze as if you are midmatch with an impossible hook landed. What would you—
—and whatever she says matters less than the wail inside, what Jimenez called Dempsí’s hunger or the hollowness you know differently a week later when you’re about to leave for the national training camp and Jimenez gets sick, hours before you are meant to take the bus to the sports commissioner in the capital and from there to the national camp, your coach collapsed not because you’re leaving, you tell yourself over and over, it’s just kidneys fail. Since it is a hospital accustomed to shocked people entering, you get to walk right in the front doors, numb all the way down a corridor of bad cases, their luck hard and your peeks horrified into rooms where all you see are yellowed feet and sagged flesh. Walking this corridor means sparring the nightmarish idea of Jimenez festering in this place as well as the choice of whether to turn back before you see him ruined. In the last room Jimenez lies, a tiny dirty box of a room holding a man who looks as if some viper has sucked all life spirit out. Because the room is tiny, because his cheeks fallen, he is too close for you to touch. Only a version of the smile you remember travels with difficulty across the mouth.
To look upon him so broken makes you need more than ever all he taught.
He was always the first to say he taught you to hold back your capital. Even if you were never supposed to use the word capital too loudly in public, except as a curse, Jimenez is no stranger to the obscenity, capital going through your head as you stand in the hospital, smelling the butter acid of urine. Which part do you touch when you want to run away? His right hand bulges in your grip, the nubs of those knuckles his very last trophy. No one speaks, your gut tight for the punch, this man both your ropes and mat. As usual he can read your mind and cracks out the truth in a dry voice: Seven years? meaning the time you trained together.
With the same tone he tells you not to worry, there is nothing you need say since once he had this exact thing, bad kidneys back in Angola while working as the leader’s chauffeur, did you know, he was the one driving the national jeep. He survived working for the leader and so it follows he will outlive this. There could be no more useful lie, both of you nodding, but now he can’t stop, telling you stuff that will not help, how he hadn’t understood that war. Imagine the number it does on a man’s head, to play foot soldier to a clown? As if this is meant to be a joke like the bread line, spittle bubbles in the corner of the same mouth that used to make you move like one happy puppet.
No one equipped you. You’ll be okay, you say, imitating his lead and lying, knowing Jimenez won’t batter this one down. Your gut dropped seven floors. Already you know everything but mainly how this is your first and hardest match. Jimenez tells you as much in his thin, splintered voice: You’re good at holding back, he says, don’t let them know what you’re made of, hold something back so it stays your own. Maybe you’ll get to America, he says, another dim quip.
You’ll be fine, you say, blindly.
He reaches up, finger sliding along your stinging jaw. Just remember—
The breath? you say. At your code, he smiles and falls into his version of sleep, rattling out a goodbye. If you remained it would mean invading a face gone slack, only the slits bigger and smaller in that crushed monument of a nose. You stay to dab the drool coming out the mouth with your shirt and then leave, backward from a king all the way outside to the bus line where you say the usual phrase with whatever you can muster: The last? Forced to remember how in that hospital Jimenez said if you weren’t already such a star, he would’ve asked you to stay to run his gym. You had wanted to say, yes, please, for you I’d do anything for you. He’d thought this answer along with you but then forbade the possibility, calling you his son, telling you to get off to the city already because he had another old friend, the tobacconist, who’d run the place. But then motioned for you to take an envelope. Once you stand in the bus line, you finger the spare key inside. And cannot go straight home so instead at the door, you try the key, making you realize all these years you never entered without your coach. A place so generous with welcome now looks injured, even the peeled-paint grill where you began. What sucks your heart out is you cannot spar with any of it, the body bag and all the equipment like bellies bursting with scuffed legs and arms, all of it making you pace, your step creaking the unlucky mats. This becomes the first place you have your own first crack, because your feet, until then in shoes you’d found the month before in a rummage bin at the government market, navy with only one hole in the toe, become no feet, only shins: you have lost your feet.
And on these stumps (the ones you find again the day you try getting one dry foot onto American soil) you run all the way home to find yourself tumbling like a heavyweight onto the couch where your mother flaps over you. Afterward, you have moros y cristianos and her sugared coffee as a going-away treat, the meal meant to betray Jimenez and his own disloyalties, hope swallowed just like that, and though after the meal you are sated and your feet are back, or enough to take you to the capital, one day you will land sputtering saltwater into the future ignoring you, the one that bit you back in the breadline, the one nobody armed you to imagine, which is the future which Dempsí got all wrong, since Dempsí was the one who called it hunger, not rage.
III.
Ten years of tile-laying. The good homes are those where owners bother offering you a glass of water while the bad ones have people who barely nod. To them you’re just another dark head speaking broken English and they’re paying illegally so best be quick. In the ring we called it the speed slide, off the ring. But try for a knockout in round one and it means sometimes your energy does not act like Everlast.
At least I work with friends, standing outside in the morning at La Floridita while cars rush by, the bunch of us happy lingering over coffee and croquetas, and maybe it was for these coffee friends that I came, or my girl
and her mother, but no one knows why I make excuses and never bring family whenever I get invited to dinner at an American’s house. Mostly I don’t want Americans to know how bad off we are: they seem to lack some capacity for basic truth. Instead I iron my best shirt whenever I go over to eat their unsalty food, taking care of myself and also never blaming anyone for anything that happened. I’m the clean one who gets invited places. One of my bosses loves showing me his Florida room with its low ceiling and three dark walls opening up to the swimming pool. I can’t suss any of it out: how does a citizen get from where I stand to where my boss is with his Florida room but maybe where I come from is what tears open my pockets.
Sometimes at the bar, too, people raise a glass to me, people I don’t know who remember when our leader was on a rampage, who believed when he called me the greatest amateur boxer in all Cuban history until I chose to leave the island and became a traitor, what he called in the papers The Day Iron Lost Its Strength. Because the leader made his rampage so public, I changed my name back from Hierro to Icaro, my birthname, just another story for all of them back on the island, my mother in pain having called me the name of the dead son just before, this just another story like the match that never happened between our homegrown Stevenson before he became a drunk and refused fighting the great Ali, the one they always retell using the words of Che’s goodbye letter to Fidel, among all the other stories we memorized in school. The goodbye story I want to tell everyone is different. Something to get them off the idea that my name means the great young boxer who swam away to become a Judas and traitor, a shame to the nation, the boxer who was the leader’s sport for a few months, my case getting coverage with no way to spit anything back, my mother under surveillance twenty-four hours a day, punished for the escape she never guessed I would make. Back then, people liked calling me the crown jewel of the leader’s system, the great mestizo: they said I had thrown away my royalty by swimming toward capital.