by John Foster
A woman appeared on the doorstep: mid-fifties, greying hair, wearing a red cotton print dress. If she was the person in the snapshot, she had put on weight. I was unsure.
‘Señora Gomez?’
‘Si.’
‘La madre de Juan?’
I had imagined this meeting many times, prepared my script, rehearsed the Spanish phrases. But the mention of his name and the sight of my foreign face told her all she needed to know. She paused, and then she was on the pavement, hugging me, her face buried on my shoulder, her horn-rimmed spectacles pressing into my collarbone. She was crying.
She had known about Juan’s illness. In his letters he had told her, as he told anyone who bothered to enquire about the state of his health, that he had an ulcer. Early in 1986, in the absence of a definite medical diagnosis, that had seemed a reasonable explanation of his persistent stomach pains, and there had been no point in canvassing any more sinister alternative.
She had replied promptly to the first intimation of this news. ‘Son, I tell you that I very much regret you have a stomach ulcer but I advise you to look after yourself and don’t do stupid things like eating spicy food since this is very dangerous. Carry out the treatment as the doctor has told you.’
In a subsequent letter he must have tried to allay her concern. There was, after all, no ulcer. Nevertheless, she continued to fret maternally. In December she had urged him to find a tablet or a medicine so this would not happen again. In the name of God and of all the saints and of St Barbara she hoped that he would be well. ‘The only desire in my life’, she had written, ‘is to be able to see you one day with all my soul because you were my son. I hardly remember your face, but I hope to embrace you and kiss you one day before I die.’
After this there had been silence from Cuba, most likely because she was waiting for a reply that never came. Finally, nearly six months later she had written again:
17 June
Year 29 of the Revolution
My dear son,
Before anything else a strong embrace and a big kiss that will touch the heart of us both.
I have an immense desire to see you but it appears that destiny does not want it that way. I carry you in my heart and bless you every day so that things will work out as you want.
I must tell you that on Mothers’ Day I received no word from you which gave me great pain.
It was not her son who opened that letter, not the son whose face she scarcely remembered, whom destiny had removed from her embrace. It was I who opened the letter, which made it clear that she had not received the news that I had sent in April. Why not? The mail to Cuba was slow, but it could hardly take eight weeks. Had some sharp-eyed postal clerk spotted the letter and steamed off the exotic stamps? Or had the censor intervened?
‘Did you never receive my letter?’ I asked, when we were sitting in the living room of the low white house. ‘It was a long letter, several pages, in good Spanish that my neighbour from Peru translated for me.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘From Australia I heard nothing. I heard only from Germany.’
After her Mothers’ Day letter I had decided to write to Juan’s younger brother Rafi in East Germany so that he could relay the message from there. With such delicacy as I could command, I had sent him the news that his brother was dead. He had died of AIDS, but since I did not know (though I could well imagine) how that sickness might be regarded in Cuba, I had not included this detail in my letter to his mother which, in any case, it seemed that she had not received. And so it was from Weimar that the news finally reached the house on the Calle Pinto.
Now, after the passage of a year, I unpacked the few mementos I had brought with me: a pair of ballet shoes that had been tucked together at the bottom of a suitcase, a handful of photos, and a picture of the grave. For the tombstone the mason had suggested a black marble that could be polished to a mirror finish. ‘It lasts forever,’ he had said; ‘Specially imported. From South Africa.’ That meant that it was out of the question. Instead, I had sent to Sydney for a supply of Gosford sandstone, and on that more friendly surface were engraved the words:
Sacred to the Memory
of
JUAN GUALBERTO CÉSPEDES
BORN 12 JULY 1953
IN CUBA
DIED 17 APRIL 1987
Sitting in her wicker chair, his mother gazed at the photo and said nothing. Her face was closed. Was she trying to decipher the Gothic lettering of the first line? The mason thought this flourish gave the inscription a touch of class, but it seemed to me merely sentimental, and I regretted not having instructed him more carefully. Unnerved by so much concentrated silence, or simply distracted by this curious intervention in the routine of his retirement, the baker Céspedes—who was also present—opened the bottle of rum I had brought from the dollar shop in Santiago. He was hunting for a glass when she said, without looking up, ‘But of what did he die?’
In this gravestone she was confronted again with the evasiveness in which Juan had shrouded his life and which she had tried so often, and so unsuccessfully, to penetrate in her letters. ‘Write to me telling me how you are, but do not send me a letter telling me lies, because I want to know the truth of your life.’ From her restricted perspective nothing in his life had seemed fixed. ‘Do you live in America or Australia?’ she had asked in genuine bewilderment. But if Juan had not told her, and Rafi would not, neither was it for me to tell her the truth of his death. It was enough to say that he had died of a virus for which they could find no remedy.
There was one last memento: a copy of John Rickard’s book Australia: A Cultural History, which had been launched just before I left for Cuba. It was written with a foreign readership in mind, though hardly so foreign, I imagine, as the audience it found here in Guantánamo. What would a Cuban reader make of Dame Edna Everage, portrayed here kicking up her outsize feet on the desk of the editor of Quadrant? It didn’t matter. In this shuttered room on the Calle Pinto the pictures of Mr Chifley gazing into the prototypical jaws of a Holden sedan, of Bondi beach boys indulging themselves, of Billy Graham crusading for Christ in heathen Sydney—all these were no more than footnotes to the clean white page of the dedication. It was for Juan and me. This was the only public place in which our names appeared together, the next best thing to a marriage notice, I thought, as though there were no grave that intervened. And in this dedication, I persuaded myself, she might see more clearly what before she could only have surmised.
For a moment she disappeared into the other room, and came back with a children’s picture book that had been recycled as a photo album. This, it transpired, contained the meagre record of Juan’s life: three childhood portraits, all slightly defiant—prettily, sourly, doggedly—as though he were determined to reject the blame that had vaguely attached to him since his difficult birth.
He was born in July 1953, at the beginning of Carnival. Two weeks after he had made his troublesome entry into the world, there was another sign that this was an inauspicious month for new beginnings. Only a few miles away to the west, while the country partied and drank itself to a standstill, Fidel Castro and his band of guerrillas launched their famous attack on the Moncada barracks. It was to have been the signal for revolt, a call to the nation to enlist against the dictatorship under the banner of liberty. It failed, and the rebels were hunted down like dogs. When one of their number refused to divulge the secrets of the group, she was presented with the gouged-out eyes of her brother. When she refused again, she was offered the testicles of her lover. That was in July 1953, at the end of Carnival, in the month that Juan was born.
Fidel was captured and arraigned before the judge. He rejected any guilt: ‘History will absolve me,’ he told the judge. But history, to which Fidel appealed with the confidence of one who intended to make it, absolves (or condemns) only those who cut a figure in the world. Mostly it neither absolves nor condemns; it simply forgets.
Without a special claim on history, Juan would have to depend for
absolution on the more conventional rites and capacious memory of the church. His grandmother saw to that. She presented him for baptism at the parish church of Santa Catarina de Ricci who, appropriately for a town with such inadequate sanitation, specialised in the cure of stomach complaints. The mystical washing away of his sin, one may reasonably assume, was satisfactorily accomplished. The expiation of his guilt was not. For it arose, after all, not so much from his fault as from the fault that was imputed to him.
The fault grew. He became that most provoking phenomenon, a delicate child whose condition neither worsened nor improved, who neither flourished nor sickened. He required and received from his grandmother special attention, and they entered accordingly into a conspiracy of affection. When his stomach revolted against cow’s milk, or powdered milk, or tins of American milk, Clara de la Rosa pressed him fresh guava juice. When he would not eat for fear of his bowels running, she fried him sweet white fish for breakfast. When there was rice, his must come from the bottom of the pan where it was allowed to catch on the fire and crisp in just the right degree.
And then, five years and five months after her first difficult birth, when the doctor had told her she might never have another child, Juan’s mother was delivered of a second son. Uncomplicated, healthy Rafi bounced into the world under the star of the Revolution, in the very month of the Triumph. His arrival compounded Juan’s guilt. He would always be measured against his younger brother and often be found wanting. Neither flight nor the passage of years would release him from the expectations that pressed on him as the older son. Even twenty-five years later his mother would write:
Do you still love me now that Rafael is big? This is to tell you that I need you, if you can, to help me. I have been making a house for more than five years and I cannot finish it because of the economic situation. I need you to send me some money, and I ask you this as your mother because I truly need it. Reply urgently so that I know whether I can count on you, or whether your brother will have to start work and leave his studies.
In the matter of the house, which involved the construction of a third room, Juan did what little he could. With the punitive exchange rate and the government levy the dollars he sent were reduced to a pitifully small number of pesos. But the arrival even of a small amount of money in Guantánamo made news. In other, paler parts of the country, from which the white middle classes had fled the Revolution in their hundreds of thousands, parcels and remittances from Miami and New Jersey were commonplace. From black Guantánamo, though, there had been few refugees. This town had been solid for Fidel from the beginning. ‘Patria o muerte!’ they had cried, an admirable sentiment so long as it was not put to the test. And besides, what attraction could there be for them in the United States where black people, as they had heard, were lynched? But patriotism and pride had an unanticipated disadvantage, and the consequence was that in this part of the country there were few remittances from abroad.
It is understandable, therefore, that when work began on the third room of the Céspedes house, it excited comment. Especially it stirred deep memories in a younger neighbour, one Tania, who determined to apply to Juan’s mother for his address. How sweetly she must have talked, how nostalgically she yearned to renew an old friendship! And how pleased she was to receive his address!
‘I’m earning 110 pesos to maintain three boys and I cannot lift my head,’ she wrote to her querido y estimado amigo Juan.
He who has nothing is looked down upon. I know that—you for me and I for you—we are like brothers since our childhood. If I have not written to you earlier, don’t call me false. Juan Gualberto, I know it is within your reach because some friends of mine have been sent to. I do not need anything else; only a cheque for 500 dollars to buy clothes for these boys. Do not send goods because I cannot redeem the parcel from the post office.
A letter from Cuba always meant drama. There would sometimes be tears, sometimes a morose, impenetrable silence as he worked his way again through layers of regret and loneliness. This, though, produced a flash of fury that settled into brooding anger. The temerity of the woman outraged him. How could he ever forget the way she had made his teenage years a misery? She had hounded him, tormented him, branded him as a faggot. And now, incredibly, she came begging for five hundred dollars.
She had called him a faggot, a loca, a queen, a crazy one—not once, I suspect, but repeatedly, with that particular venom that teenage girls can so devastatingly deploy. Each time she taunted him she pronounced a sentence of excommunication, as surely as if she had been the Bishop of Havana himself. Or you might say she spoke with the power of those triumphant guerrillas with their adorable revolutionary beards who set before the country new and higher standards of machismo. Or perhaps she spoke only for her disappointed adolescent self. Whatever the case, the result was the same. A loca was ridiculous, no more than a village idiot in drag.
And, of course, it was true. Why else, all those years ago, had her dear and esteemed Juan Gualberto sauntered off in the evenings to join the little gaggle of youths who assembled in el Parque 24, or on the square in front of the cemetery on the edge of town, or in the bushes that grew along the Guantánamo River? In these out-of-the-way places he had discovered a circle of friends, an amusing and special society where the queenly figure of La Negra held court. She was a handsome youth, slim and spectacularly black, and she knew how to enhance the impact she made. She could flutter her made-up eyelashes with fatal charm; she could toss her straightened black hair with Hollywood panache. By comparison, her companions were rather less chic. There was Tomasa Corduroy, whom the Revolution had unfairly restricted to the one pair of trousers from which she derived her name. And La Bizca, in whom one eye crossed the other when she was angry or excited, a decided misfortune, though to a connoisseur it might have an unpredictable attraction.
In this company Juan Gualberto was also transformed. ‘Such a noisy boy,’ La Negra recalled. ‘So loud.’ But he had pretensions to elegance. Within this charming circle he took on the neatly androgynous name of Michel(le), to which, with impressive hauteur, he attached the surname D’Ambreville. They were names from his grandmother’s family, bestowed originally by a French plantation owner on the Haitian slave from whom Clara de la Rosa was descended. Those were the names he chose, assuming at once the identity of a slave and an aristocrat. He might be a faggot, but he would not be common.
Nevertheless, he was a scandal. The fault in him was visible. At home he could still rely on his grandmother for moral support, though when he danced about or acted queenishly, even she would join in poking fun at him: ‘La puta en acción!’ For the baker Céspedes it was past a joke. With commendable fatherly concern he began to enquire whether there was not a chance of placing such a talented boy as his in a scholarship programme in Havana. It happened that there was. No doubt the baker agreed that one could not be too particular in choosing a career; one had to consider the needs of the Revolution as well as the opportunities it presented. In this way Juan found himself enrolled in the Veterinary Institute Juan P. Carbo Servia. And in a time-honoured way a small-town family relieved itself of an unmerited embarrassment.
It may be that I have done the baker an injustice. About these events Juan was singularly silent. But it is true to say that the veterinary career on which he so surprisingly embarked never fired his imagination.
Nor, it seems, did Havana itself. Why, I wondered, when I came to wander through the streets of the old city and along the great sea wall, did he never hint at the fabulous faded beauty of this city? A thirteen-year-old scholarship student cannot be expected to enthuse about the glories of colonial architecture or the patterning of glass in the fanlights of a palace courtyard. But did he not recall the dappled shade of the Prado where the wives of Spanish merchants, and then the high-class prostitutes, had once paraded in the evening breeze? Or the banks of gardenias around the white marble fountain in the Parque Central? He never referred to these things; and if I mention them now, it
is because I like to invest his memory with their fragrances.
Juan’s Havana was crystallised, set and polished in one recurring image. In Guantánamo he had taken dancing lessons, and his aptitude was such that when he arrived in Havana to study goats and cows he was also admitted to classes with the school of the National Ballet. The revolutionary credentials of this institution were impeccable. Alicia Alonso had founded it in 1948. She had gone into exile under the dictatorship, and she returned after the Triumph to establish an art not of kings and of rulers but rather an art of the people. And was not the scholarship boy from Guantánamo of the people? Even if, as he noticed, the people at the ballet were almost entirely white? So why did they come to him—sometime in 1968—with the objection that though he danced like an angel and had great talent, he was not quite suitable for the school? His conduct, they managed to imply, was not quite proper. He would have to leave. The injustice of it stunned him. In the fog of words he heard again the taunting voice of Tania. His protests went unheard. ‘Johnny,’ he told me a dozen times, ‘I didn’t do nothing!’
That was precisely the point. It was puzzling only if you assumed, as he most certainly had, that they judged you on the basis of your actions. What he had not yet learned was that the Revolution took a broader view of a man. Of course it was interested in what you did, and the Committees for its Defence kept a careful watch on that. (Is this what the poet meant by ‘loving the Revolution’s impact on the eyes’?) But it was also curious to know what you were, so that it might more efficiently determine what you would become.
This was no ordinary revolution. It aimed at nothing less than the reformation of the human race. Society, said El Che, must be converted into a gigantic school, a vast reformatory. The Maximum Leader agreed. And so the great experiment began, to the plaudits of French philosophers, American radicals and liberal churchmen who flocked to the island paradise to witness the realisation of a dream, and to savour the paradox that was Cuba: so slow to abolish slavery, so late to overthrow the Spanish yoke, yet now the cradle of the future, the birthplace of the New Man.